Kommentar schreiben

In 1997 I moved to Vienna, Austria from London to take up a new life working in marketing for an investment bank. This was rather a strange story in itself. I was working in retail in London, responsible for a store selling leisurewear in Fulham. A customer was telling me how she worked in marketing in Vienna while she was deliberating on the purchase of a new ski suit. I told her I had always wanted to work in marketing and she told me she was in London for a job interview - if she got the job I could apply for her's. At this time I was desperately seeking a new work environment and always had a CV to hand. However, I still could not believe it when a member of staff called me on my day off to tell me Louise had popped in and I should give her a call. After very many phone calls, an interview in the bank's offices in London and a trip to Vienna I was actually given the job: "its a small risk for us, and a little risk for you". Thus I moved to Vienna and have never looked back since. I enjoyed life in the city enormously and became a member of the Anglican Church in Vienna. The Church had a program to visit elderly members of the congregation who where more or less housebound, so I signed up. The concept was not entirely new to me as I had done something similar when studying in Manchester. There I had spent several afternoons visiting an Irish builder, “Mr Williams”, who, once he was moved to the home always asked me if I would like a drink of the whisky he kept hidden in his bedside cupboard. However, as student life became more demanding and I started working to support it, my visits gradually petered out. Now here I was, having finally found a lifestyle I enjoyed in this foreign city and happy the turn my life had taken since my move from London. I felt I needed to give something back. Sally, the assistant chaplain at the time, and later the priest who married me and christened my son, told me I could go and visit June Schmiderer, living on her own in Hietzing, a suburb of Vienna near Schönbrunn Palace. In retrospect, I don’t know who gained more from our meetings. June became a very dear friend, with whom I could drink countless cups of tea and discuss my thoughts, ideas and life’s hitches quite openly. I was always sure of a sympathetic ear and in that sense she became a substitute “grandmother”. I hope June enjoyed our afternoon tea sessions just as much and didn’t mind my probing questions when I was trying to write her life story! I can still remember how nervous I was of asking her about her former boyfriends, a topic she carefully avoided till then. She admitted, when I asked her, that I was the first person she’d told. Speaking to her and listening to her adventures made the Second World War, Churchill and post-war Europe more vivid than any history lesson I ever had at school. While typing up these episodes my fingers became damp with sweat, I was so excited, so thrilled to be the person to capture these memoirs on text.

You must imagine our sessions like this: first we would have a cup (or several) of tea with some cake – either from June’s meals-on-wheels lunch, one a friend had made, or something I’d brought – then we would go over the script from the previous week, I would ask questions about things which were not quite clear (very often also how to spell something, which June would spell out loud after only a few seconds thought), then I would bring her little cassette recorder in from the kitchen, she would lean over it and speak her story into it. Back at home her voice would accompany my typing, stopping and starting in response to my frequent pressing of the re-wind button, enabling me to catch her way of speaking and bring her to life throughout this story. June’s incredible memory certainly puts mine to shame!

She gave me a soufflé dish for my birthday, with the words, “it was one of my mother’s wedding gifts”. I didn’t know much then. Now, I look at its delicate silverwork, slightly tarnished with age, with a better understanding of where and when it was given to Rua Lamb and just how far it has travelled. It was a wonderful gift and I enjoyed baking my very first cheese soufflé in it for June.

Through June I’ve learnt how to bake an English Christmas cake. I’ve enjoyed meeting her brother Richard, her friend Nancy and her daughter Stephanie, when they came to visit.  June’s common sense has helped me in my dizzier moments and I look forward to many more convivial cups of tea and pieces of cake! I hope you’ll enjoy reading her amazing story just as much as I enjoyed writing it down.

Kommentar schreiben

 
I, June Farquhar von Schmiderer, was born on the 13 February 1921 in Sydney, Australia. I think I was born in a maternity home in the suburb of Roseville then called North Shore Line because of the railway line along the north shore, the best part of Sydney in which to live in those days. My mother, Amy Rua Lamb, but always called “Rua”, was born a Farquhar in 1891 in Australia. My father, Philip Lamb, was born in 1878 in India. My grandfather, his father, Richard, was born in Cumberland, England and fell in love with a young lady on board the Eldorado ship during his first journey out to India at the age of 22. My grandmother, Caroline Georgiana Home Thomas, was on board having been rescued from a ship, also on its way to India, which sank in the Mediterranean. She had completed her UK education and was travelling out to join her father, General Thomas of the Royal Artillery, in Madras. When the Eldorado finally reached Colombo in Ceylon, the two travellers had become engaged and were duly married in Madras on 16 May 1876. By the time my father was born, my grandfather had tea plantations in Southern India, in Mysore. My father was born there and sent back to England to school, to a big public boy’s school on the west coast of Cumberland called Rossal. A very Spartan school, as most public schools in England were in the 1890s. One of the punishments was to run naked, in winter, up and down the sands, ten times. A very gruesome kind of punishment. My father, Philip, shared a study with a boy called Thomas Beecham. Thomas was the son of one of the owners of the firm making Beecham’s little liver pills and was always trying to persuade my father to have a little pill. Meanwhile Philip’s parents, out in India, thought it would be a good idea if he learnt to play the violin. Daddy was totally tone deaf, completely unmusical, and had to practise playing this instrument in the shared study, making awful screeching sounds, day in, day out. Thomas Beecham became so fed-up, he couldn’t bear it one minute longer; he snatched the violin out of my father’s hands and broke it over his head. That was the end of my father’s violin-playing days. Thomas Beecham later became a famous English conductor and made a great career for himself; he frequently conducted at the Proms. After school my father returned to India and Sir Thomas no doubt went to university.

Daddy’s parents lived in a bungalow on the outskirts of Sydney on Hunter’s Hill and they also sent their daughters, Cora and Georgina, to boarding schools in England. I hardly knew my paternal grandparents; they died when I was very small. I remember visiting them once, but that’s all. Towards the end of the First World War, Daddy volunteered, but was deemed too old to be taken on as a serving soldier. Instead he was made a captain in Basra, Mesopotamia[1], looking after the army supplies in that part of the world. By the time the war ended his parents had retired from the tea plantations and immigrated to Australia, to Sydney. I can't tell you what happened to the tea plantations - they were probably sold. As a child you just listened to what you were told by your parents and didn't ask questions. So, my father joined his parents in Australia, obtaining a job as manager of a sugar plantation in Fiji. There was an enormous sugar company, called the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) in those days, with sugar plantations in northern Queensland and Fiji. My father obtained this job in Laukota, where his Hindustani was useful with the Indian field labourers.

My mother's grandfather, Alexander Barclay Farquhar, served with P&O (Peninsular & Orient Line) from 1847 to 1878, finally as captain of the Avoca, the first steamship ever to enter Sydney Harbour. He then retired and remained in Sydney - that's how the Farquhars arrived in Sydney from Scotland. His son, Walter Farquhar, my mother's father, was the manager of the big CSR sugar mill in northern Queensland, on the Mackay River, where my mother was born. My grandmother was from the Kemmis family, which immigrated to Australia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were a large family, derived from French Huguenots who settled in England during the French Revolution, where their name ‘de Camois’ degenerated into Camys. By the time they reached Australia they were called Kemmis. The de Camois family lived in Petworth in Sussex, not far from where we settled when we came to England. We visited the church there later, where there is a brass plaque with the name of de Camois still clearly to be seen.

My mother, Rua, was one of five children – with a sister, Dorothy, and three brothers – Wallace, Barclay and Clive. She used to tell us stories of huge carpet snakes hanging on the rafters of the stables, alligators in the river – a very exciting life. When Rua was a young girl, she went to school in Sydney and the family spent their holidays up in Queensland. She was very keen on riding; she sometimes even used to ride bareback, without a saddle. One day, wanting to saddle her horse, Rua went into the stables, which were very dark and gloomy. All the saddles and reins, all the things for saddling the horse, were hung over a big rafter. She, not thinking, saw the saddle and the stirrups, put up her hand, pulled it down, but it wasn’t a saddle, it was a big carpet snake she was hanging onto. Carpet snakes were kept in the stables to eat the mice, but fortunately they weren’t poisonous. Big, huge snakes coiled around the rafters. That must have been a shock, thinking you’re getting down your saddle and you catch onto a big carpet snake coiled round the rafters! They had alligators up in the rivers there as well, horrible, I wouldn’t have liked that at all. As a prank Rua, Dorothy and their brothers used to make mud cakes to tease the young men assistants, from Sydney or somewhere, who’d come to learn the business, the sugar industry. The cook was very good at making mud cakes decorated with some kind of lime. They took these in to the young men and said, “do have a piece of cake”. A beautiful slice of mud cake was cut; the unfortunate young man of the day took a big bite and spat it out, thinking how horrible! They were always playing tricks on people. When Rua’s father retired the family came down to live in Sydney in a beautiful big house at Darling Point. The house was built by convicts, a lovely yellow sandstone building. In 1973 my cousin Ann Gemmell Smith and her mother, Dorothy – my mother’s sister – and I went to look at this house with its big garden and the tennis court where Dorothy and Rua played as girls.

My mother’s full name was Amy Rua Farquhar - Rua was Fijian for two, and her parent’s thought that Amy two Farquhar sounded very nice, so that is what she was called. Rua also exists in the Maori language and in Gaelic, but that has nothing to do with it. She wasn't born in Fiji, but they were all very bound up with Fiji somehow or other. Aunty Dorothy was the oldest, Mummy must have been second, and then there was Uncle Barclay, Uncle Wallace – killed flying with the Australian Air Force in the First World War in Egypt where he was a gunner in an open fighter plane. Wallace was standing up, firing his machine gun at the German fighters and then shot down. The youngest brother was called Clive – he died of cancer about 1930 in Fiji, where he was working with the CSR Company.

My mother Rua attended a ladies' school in Sydney, run by two English ladies, she loved telling us about it. She was always a good talker, unlike me, so she was always telling us things. A very strict and very nice school where she learnt to sing – she loved singing and had a very beautiful voice. Her parents, my maternal grandparents, took Rua and her sister Dorothy on a World Tour in 1911. They visited Switzerland, England, France – all the capitals of Europe. She would tell me about skating in Adelboden in Switzerland and being proposed to by a young man who didn’t interest her in the slightest. Her father then had to write this young man a letter, ‘thank you very much, but his daughter didn't wish for his attentions any longer’. In England they were asked out to dinner to a big county house, friends of the family in Derbyshire. The butler served smoked salmon and my aunt Dorothy said, "no thank you, I only eat tinned salmon"! There was much consternation all round the table; it was a great faux pas. They also visited Paris – the opera in Paris. During the interval all the Paris gentlemen were walking round the foyer wearing top hats. My grandfather of course thought he must put his hat on too, but he only had a felt cap. He was walking around amongst all these top hatted gentlemen with this on – until one of the attendants came up to him and said, "sir, please remove your cap, its not the thing to do to wear a cap here". Only shady characters from Montmartre wore that type of cap! In Germany the family stayed in a hotel where the two girls noticed the sheets in the beds were crumpled and not quite clean. They complained to the maid, who said, "oh madam, those sheets were slept in yesterday by the Crown Prince of Germany". They were not interested in the Crown Prince however and demanded some clean sheets!

At the end of the First World War my mother took a trip to visit some connections in Fiji. Before leaving, she went to a fortune-teller who told her that she would fall in love with a fair, wavy-haired young man on the Fiji boat. And it all came true – when my father Philip removed his cap on the boat there was a deep wave in his blond hair. They were married in Sydney in 1920. At this time Philip was still working in the sugar plantations in Fiji. I know this because there is a photo of me with my Amah (Fijian nurse) and my father on a big rattan rug in the garden there. When I was born my mother came home to her parents to have me and we returned to Fiji for about a year. Then my father left the sugar plantation and took over his father’s business in Sydney with the partner, Mr. B. Lloyd, importing tea and coffee from India. The business included an automated packing factory and a shop in the Sydney Arcade. My brother Richard says one of his earliest memories is of walking round the factory with him and seeing the big circular packaging machines. Their trademark was “Lloyds A1 Tea & Coffee”, as A1 means the very best, and Lloyds hinting at “Lloyds of London Insurance”. 

Philip and Rua built a house in Killara, 18 Arnold Street, Sydney, where mother's sister Dorothy had already settled. There was still a lot of bush along the North Shore Line at this time (1923) and most of the suburbs had Aboriginal names. The North Shore Line ran up to a place called Hornesby, where they had a branch of The King's School, Canterbury, which still exists today. All my mother's brothers went to this public school; it was the best school in Sydney.

My father built a big bungalow on a slope, running down from the road to a creek at the bottom. A large piece of land was cleared of all the bush and trees, though some gum trees were left at the top, along the fence. The house was built about a third of the way down the slope – it was quite steep with steps and paths. It was named “Burrell Green”, after my father’s old home, a big farmhouse in Cumberland near Penrith. He’d lived there as a boy, during the holidays from school, with aunts and uncles. There were two huge verandas; one was the sleeping veranda for my younger brother and myself. The other big veranda was where people sat. This veranda entered straight into the large sitting or drawing room – my mother didn't like it much, she would have preferred a hall. From the drawing room big sliding doors revealed a dining room and from thence to the kitchen. A passageway connected all the other rooms: the bathroom with a gas boiler for the warm water; my father's dressing room; the maid's room; the big spare room; my parent’s large bedroom opening onto our sleeping veranda.

Our clothes, as far as I can remember, were kept in the spare room as we slept on the veranda. It was considered extremely healthy for children to sleep in the fresh air and the veranda was completely open with only a low parapet between the garden and the beds. I was always terrified thinking snakes were coming over the sides of the wall. Of course they never did, but as a child you imagine these things. There were blinds, made of wooden slats that were always drawn up and open all day and all night in the summer. They were lowered in the winter when it rained and was slightly colder. I didn't like sleeping on my back, and I wouldn't sleep with my face towards the garden, in case I saw something coming over the wall, so I always slept with my face towards my parent’s bedroom. There was a big door between their bedroom and the veranda and it was always open. In the summer we slept under mosquito nets. Our two cats, Brownie and Blackie, used to sleep at our feet on top of the mosquito nets. We had one big fireplace in the sitting room with an open fire in the winter when it was sometimes a bit cold. It was never very cold. We had frost once; I remember treating that with great excitement. There were huge storms, cyclones, every now and then; we stayed home on hurricane days. In summer it was so hot you couldn't go out, you had to close all the shutters and blinds to keep cool.

One of my first experiences of the cinema were the "Broadway Melodies” in the late 1920s, the melodies were lovely. “Tarzan of the Apes” was the first film I saw when I was about ten. We went to see it with my Grandmother. There were all sorts of lions, tigers and snakes in this African jungle, they completely terrified me! Tarzan was the famous Johnny Weissmüller from Lower Austria – no one knew him in those days. He made a yodelling noise as he swung from branch to branch. I couldn't sleep at night afterwards and nearly had nightmares from this film. The only night that I dared to sleep on my back, or facing the garden, was on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve was the one safe night of the year when nothing could possibly hurt me. You see I had faith in Jesus and God, keeping me safe on this night. Christmas Day was always spent with my mother's aunt, Aunt May Fenner – a sister of my grandmother – and her family. She had a large Christmas tree and gave a huge family party. We had a big Christmas tree at home too, in our sitting room, with presents tied to it, but no candles or lights. On Christmas Day we would find a large pillowcase filled with presents hanging at the end of our beds – opened even before our parents were awake. They were always served “early morning tea” with slices of thin white bread and butter at 7am by our dear Northumbrian maid, Elsie.

At the beginning we had two servants: one housemaid and one cook, though the cook left fairly soon. The maid stayed with us all the time we were in Australia until we left. She was a lovely person called Elsie Lindsay – from Newcastle upon Tyne. Many people from northern England immigrated to Australia when there was no work to be had at home during the depression after the Great War (1914-18) as it was then called. She did everything for us in Killara. When we left to go to England in 1933, she joined us a year later in Sussex and worked for us there. Later she also worked in my father's business in East Grinstead. I'll always remember Elsie, she spoke with a broad North Country accent – instead of saying "Mrs. Lamb" she'd always say "Mrs. Larrrmb". She taught us to sing a North Country song “The Blaydon Races”, which I still vividly remember, “…Gannin along the Scotswood Road
To see the Blaydon Races…” My brother and I, when we were still small, used to have our supper separately at 6pm. My parents then had dinner in the dining room at 6.30pm, as Elsie had to be finished with her work for her time off by 8pm. Then, when we were older we were allowed to dine with the grownups in the evenings.

My brother, Richard Farquhar Lamb, was born on the 29 March 1924. We both attended school from the age of five – a small private school called Willesden (we used to say “Will-es-den” being Australian), about 15 minutes up the road towards the railway station of Killara on the North Shore Line. The train line, even in the 1920's, was already electrified. Willesden School was primarily built of wood and consisted of five large classrooms – the lavatories were in a separate building completely covered in wisteria – I always remember the scent when it was in flower – masking any other not so pleasant ones! The classrooms stood on piles so you could see right through the bottom of them, maybe because there were trapdoor spiders in the yard, which are very dangerous. Willesden School was situated in the large grounds of a two-storey Victorian house belonging to the two sisters who ran the school. They didn’t teach, but had their various mistresses. There was a dancing mistress who came every week and we had classical dance classes – I loved it and always wanted to take up dancing as a career, but they said I couldn't do that, I was much too tall. I was almost the same height as I am now – I was five foot ten and a half at the age of 12! We were given prizes bound in beautiful leather with a handwritten label inside. I always received the prize for dancing.

Miss Hill, one of the mistresses, married an Englishman just before we left Australia for England. We gave her a goodbye present (an umbrella!) and a farewell party thinking we would never see her again. Then, when we were settled in Crawley Down near East Grinstead and were walking down the High Street one day, whom should we bump into but Miss Hill, now Mrs. Wood. She and her husband had bought a house on the outskirts of East Grinstead!

Willesden School no longer exists. It was demolished several years ago to make way for a Japanese-owned block of flats. My brother was there on a visit not so long ago and saw there had been a plaque let into the pavement, ‘this is where Willesden School existed from 1907 to 1937, in memory of Marjorie Paton’. I remember Marjorie Paton, our gym mistress, very well. She taught us tennis, basketball and gave us some exercises to do outside every morning. We didn’t have anything like this in England, they were terribly lax in those things. There was a big basketball ground at the front of the school and down the back of the school, very far back, there were tennis courts. At Willesden School, we played tennis during the afternoon in the heat; there was no shade except for a big pepper tree. Sometimes we used to take sandwiches for lunch and sit down under this pepper tree. Otherwise we went home for lunch. We had school from 9 till 12.30, then from 2 till 4 o'clock. Wednesday was Elsie, our maid's, day off and Mummy cooked lunch. It was normally mince, which I never liked very much, but it was probably easy to cook for children. She wasn't a great cook my mother, she loved gardening, but didn’t enjoy cooking very much.

Miss Durack was the headmistress and visited us in England when she retired. She came from a very well known Irish family, with great cattle stations in the west of Australia. She taught us history, Latin – that I didn't like, and maths – which I was no good at and hated. Literature and French were two of the other subjects as well as geology, geography and deportment – with heavy boards on our heads. I was much ahead in most subjects, especially history, when I started at St. Joan’s, Horely, in England in 1934. We also had copybook writing – we had proper copybooks with a sentence along the top and we had to copy this for several lines underneath. It was a very old-fashioned style of handwriting with many loops above and beneath, Victorian, I imagine. When I attended school in England, from the age of 12, I had to learn to do it differently. In 1933, in English schools, they had a very different style of handwriting called “Scripten” with no flourishes. We had cards to copy down from and no copybooks. I was given bad marks if I used an "f" with a loop at the top and a "p" with a loop at the bottom. It took me a long time to get rid of my loops. They were all crossed off in red ink.

There was an Anglican Church in Australia, St. Michael's, where we went to Sunday School and where I was christened. I had a many friends in the area, and we would always have birthday parties in our garden for my birthday in February (the middle of summer in Australia). There were fishing rods and a basket full of presents to fish for. David Jones and Farmers were two big department stores in Sydney that also used to host children's parties with balloons and crackers, conjurers, cakes filled with sweets – for at least twenty children. You were sometimes invited to a ‘Children's Party at Farmers’ or at David Jones on birthday occasions.

My father built me a cottage, called Rose Cottage, at the bottom of the garden. It was like a big doll’s house with two windows. I had all my doll's things there and a little methylated spirits stove where I could cook vegetables – I normally cooked tomatoes. I can still remember the smell of that stove. There were little brown lizards that ran around everywhere, we also used to find snakeskins lying in the garden sometimes. I was always terrified of the bush fires - the bush was fairly close, and you could always see the red glow in the distance. All the ash falling down in the garden, the smell of the burning bush, it was horrible. Our garden went down in terraces, three in all. My father looked after his vegetable garden and a gardener called Ernie did the rest. Daddy was keen on dahlias, planted on the terrace below the vegetable garden. There was a terrace lower down where we kept the fowl yard so we had fresh eggs. Daddy used to prepare a big pan of mash (maize, I think) every morning and feed this to the hens before going to his office. Still further below, in a very wild part of the garden, there was a wealth of tree ferns. They grew six to eight feet tall, beautiful tree ferns. It was very damp down there because of the creek with a weeping willow tree growing across it. We used to make swings to hang on the branches and swing across the creek. The creek even had crayfish in it. Right at the very bottom there was a shelter for begonias – my father loved sweet peas, begonias and dahlias, they were his favourite flowers. He was an expert gardener, his speciality being dahlias. Later in England he created a huge yellow dahlia, which was registered and called after me – “June”. Bougainvillea climbed round the veranda and poinsettia trees also grew in the garden. We had a big mulberry tree, the leaves of which we fed to our silk-worms, kept in cardboard shoe-boxes, and when they made their silk cocoons we wound off the silk – many shades from nearly white to beige. Cicadas, or locusts, were also plentiful in the summer – Richard and I collected their outer coverings when they “shelled”. A wealth of colours: yellow, green, black, orange – they were fascinating and an exact replica of the insects. Another of our great aims was collecting as many bags of samples as possible at the immense agricultural fair in Sydney, The Sydney Fair, to play shops with them at home. There were all sorts of stands and firms showing miniature samples of their goods: porridge, tea, biscuits, coffee, marmalade. Richard and I always accompanied our parents, who looked at the animals. We also bored holes in the gum trees at the top of the garden making the gum run out, a beautiful red colour, when it hardened you could mould it. At the front of the house the shutters were all painted blue and big blue tubs filled with blue hydrangeas lined terrace. It looked very pretty. Lemon and orange trees, guava bushes, persimmon and passion fruit grew along the side along the fence, plum trees and nectarine trees. Later, I was astonished to find there was a nectarine tree in my ‘Schrebergarten’ in Austria, the allotment garden we bought after Stephanie was born in 1960.

My brother had a so-called ‘garage’ up by the top of the garden where he kept his bicycle and tricycle and so on. We didn't have a car. My Aunt Dorothy had a car, which my mother learnt to drive, but my father couldn't drive a car – he could only ride a horse. Aunt Dorothy sent her daughter Ann to boarding school in England, Ascot, at St. George’s for a year in 1930. We were all most impressed because she'd seen the Queen. Ann told us how pupils lined up in their red cloaks on both sides of the road when the Royal Family drove past in their open coaches, saying, “now I can put my elbows on the table as I’ve seen the Queen” – a great privilege. We, of course, could certainly not put our elbows on the table! Ann still lives in the house she grew up in, in Killara. Dorothy always had two cattle dogs to guard her as her husband died early on of influenza in the worldwide epidemic after the Great War, and as possums used to come and eat the rosebuds in her garden during the night she used "throw-downs" containing little pebbles, which exploded with a load bang when thrown down hard on the paving stones, to keep them away.

At Christmas we enjoyed a four to five weeks holiday – the summer holiday. We used to hire a house at a seaside place called Collaroy. I remember driving down to Collaroy through a forest recently burnt in a bush fire, everything was beginning to sprout again and ferns were already springing up. My Aunt Dorothy would drive us there by car, though she never stayed with us, but my Grandmother (Granny lived in a boarding house in Killara, her husband having died when I was very young), my brother Richard, Elsie and myself all stayed there with Mother. My father used to come down at weekends. Collaroy was a lovely place with big grassy slopes. Daddy had toboggans made and we used to ride these sledges down the slopes – it was just like being on snow. We fished – there was a lovely pool surrounded by rocks so the sharks couldn't get in. It was quite safe – I learnt to swim there.

On another headland there was a big surfing beach where we learnt to surf. Mummy was a very good surfer – of course you didn't use a board in those days, you used your body to surf. You'd see the breaker coming and would swim up to the top of it – you had to choose your breakers very carefully, some of them were dumpers. These dumped you straight down on the sand. Daddy hated swimming and was dumped by a wave. Never again did he go swimming in Collaroy! On the beach we were always covered in coconut oil, supposed to prevent sunburn. We also always wore a hat and had oiled Chinese parasols to keep off the sun, they creaked as you opened them up. My grandmother, wearing her old-fashioned black bathing costume with legs down to below the knee, used to come and watch us. Sometimes we stayed with a family called Rutherford, friends of Granny, with a house right down on the beach. They owned a big cattle and sheep station in Orange.

One holiday, when I was ten or so, I went to stay with the Rutherford’s in Orange at their station – in America you would call it a ranch, but in Australia it was called a station. The three boys used to go out shooting rabbits, rabbits were a great menace. I had to go with them, they shot a rabbit and I had blood all over my skirt. I will never forget the smell of the blood on that skirt. I didn’t like that and was very homesick. Sunday lunch there was always a roast in a big dish with a silver cover over it to keep it warm, placed in front of Mr Rutherford, who would carve it. This Sunday we were all expecting roast beef or lamb, and when the cover was lifted there were three baby rabbits on the dish! That was one of the boys’ tricks. The rabbits were taken away and the proper meat came in. One of the boys was later killed in the Australian Air Force in England during World War II. We once had a holiday in the country at a farmhouse at Cobbity, which had a small, hundred year-old church, amazing – a hundred year old church in Australia. My father didn’t like travelling; he spent his spare time in the garden, so we never went away very much.

Elsie once told us the story of the man who entered a house in a rolled up carpet and then murdered the occupants. It was very scary. Daddy was also a great storyteller. He used to tell “possum stories” every night, of two very naughty possums, Billy and Jimmy, and the awful things they got up to including adventures with troglodites – some kind of monster – very frightening. Richard and I, as children, also used to get up to plenty of mischief – we would climb up the eucalyptus trees along the side of the road – they were very lush, you couldn't see if anyone was in the tree – and drop gum nuts and so forth on people passing below. Another trick was filling parcels with stones, with people's names on them, and leaving them on the pavement, watching what people would do with them. Sometimes we would attach some money, a note, to a piece of string and place it on the road. As soon as someone bent down to pick it up we would jerk it back through our garden fence. We had bicycles; and also enjoyed balancing and walking along the top of the fence, which was quite broad.

I was the leader, with Philippa Day, of our own group called the "Nature League", similar to the Girl Guides in England. There were three to four girls in it; we used to make notes during our weekly meetings in a green covered book. Philippa Day was a very good friend of mine; she was very tiny and I was very tall. We were the organisers, the other children had to do what we told them. We probably had a Guidebook, which showed us how to do all the things we did. We used to go on tracking expeditions, tracking with sticks and stones, you weren’t allowed to use chalk marks, as though you were really in a forest. We knew how to do reef knots, the slipknot, semaphore – we took it all very seriously. At our meetings we took roll call and ticked everyone’s names off. It was very well organised, it was fun. How to do the Union Jack the right way up. All those odds and ends. Before we left we buried a kind of friendship document, very beautifully written on a scroll, near our front fence in a glass jar. We thought it might be dug up in a hundred years’ time.

There was a great depression in Sydney at the beginning of the 1930s and my father became increasingly fed-up. The economic situation was bad, there was a left-wing labour governor whom people were so frustrated with they started a political group called the New Guard, formed in Sydney in February 1931. The movement appealed to conservative returned servicemen who were strongly anti-Communist and deeply suspicious of the Labour Premier of New South Wales, John T. Lang, and his political and economic response to the Great Depression.  My father joined this New Guard, run by Eric Campbell, and they had shooting practice down at the bottom of our garden. The day came when the new Sydney Harbour Bridge was to be opened, it was one of the biggest bridges ever built at the time, and we were there at the opening. The NSW Premier, the Honourable John T. Lang, was to officially declare the Bridge open, but instead of cutting the ribbon to signify the momentous event, Captain Francis De Groot of the The New Guard dashed up on his horse, slashed the ribbon with his sword and declared the Bridge open in the name of the people of Sydney. He believed that the only person to open the Bridge should be a member of the Royal family. They tied the ribbon together again for Mr Lang to open it formally.

"Oh Colonel Campbell“

“Yes Mr Lang?”

“Why don't you scramble

Your dirty gang..."

was one of the songs circulating at this time. My father was so annoyed with the economic situation he decided to sell up everything and return to England, which he had last seen when he left school. Our house was put up for sale. Because the house was built on a slope there was an underneath part of the house where the laundry, the workshop (with all the tools and gardening things) and the wood cellar were located. In the workshop cellar my father had huge bins where he kept the mash for the fowl. Big wooden boxes in which he packed the china and glass. Finally, our parents told us we were going to England, selling the house and packing everything up in these big boxes, which my father insisted on packing himself. My mother's piano was also coming with us, but all the other furniture would be sold. The piano was important as my parents used to host musical evenings – Mummy singing and my Aunt Dorothy playing the piano; they upset me terribly as I couldn't sleep through them. Mummy had singing lessons with Fräulein Süss in Sydney and also used to accompany herself. When Uncle Barclay was over from New Zealand, visiting us later in England, he was determined that Mummy should make a record, she was a mezzo-soprano. You could privately go to a BBC studio in London to do so, however the studio deadened the sound, there wasn’t the resonance she was used to and she was very nervous, so it wasn’t a great success. I still have the record, but you have to play it with a trailing wooden needle so I can’t listen to it.  Later in Vienna, I had an Abonnement at the Musikverein and always enjoyed hearing one of ‘Mummy’s songs’: Richard Strauss, and Schumann songs. She played Negro spirituals to us and practised every evening before dinner, for which she always changed into a long dress. Daddy would give me some whisky with water to calm me down and help me sleep – horrifying my husband when I later told him this story!

My father made a beautiful sign to nail onto one of the gum trees. He wanted to write, "House for sale, apply within" but he forgot the "l" in apply, so it read "House for sale, appy within". This was then pointed out to him and he made a new sign. Anyway, the house wasn’t sold by the time we moved. I think he did sell the business, Mr Lloyd had retired by this time. Our passages were booked, our house was empty, the furniture had all been sold. My parents stayed in a boarding house for the last few weeks. The cats were supposed to be taken care of by Aunty Daisy but they kept returning to our house. My brother went to spend the last two to three weeks with Aunt Dorothy and I was sent to live with Philippa Day who lived three houses away and next to Dorothy's house. However, I was so unhappy I couldn't eat or sleep. So it was arranged that I could spend the rest of the time with my brother at Aunt Dorothy's. She didn't have much space, but we both slept on her veranda in a type of fold-up bed. I calmed down and felt better. One of my last memories in her house was of her emptying the pepper pot into a salmon kedgeree – what a shock!

Kommentar schreiben

1 February 2003

I sit in a cafe at Zurich station waiting for Michael to return from his interview. We’re thinking of moving to Switzerland, buying my grandmother’s house. I’m thinking of these things as I sit down and drink a cup of coffee. I realise that I know all the different coffee types in Vienna, but not how to order the coffee I like in Switzerland, the country of my origin. I want to read my magazine, but overhear the couple at the next table having an interesting conversation. I decide to sketch; this enables me to tune in. The American is imbibing his performance with maximum pathos and conviction. He’s almost convincing, speaking as only Americans can. While he goes to relieve himself after his efforts I’m tempted to turn to her and say, “don’t do it, don’t lend him the cash, you’ll never see it again”. Instead I write a poem.

Sitting in the station café

Coffee cup lukewarm at my elbow

Bitter taste on my tongue

Listening to a conversation

At the next-door table.

Man reasons, life plans, plea for cash

Woman listens, hedges, unsure.

“I really don’t know what to do…”

“What?”

“About the money”

“Excuse me, is this table  …?”

“Yes”

Youth unfettered by the youthful

Life problems on the other side

Sits down, laughing, holding hands.

Old man pays his bill

Solitary beer melting with pleasure on his tongue

Watching life around him

Rustle of paper pretending

To read, turning random pages.

An hour waiting in the station café

Snatches of other lives

Other joys, other grief

More refreshing than the empty

Coffee cup at my elbow. 

I was born in Switzerland on the 3rd July 1971. After my brother was born my parents decided to move to England as my father became a chef at the renowned Swiss Center on Piccadilly Circus. So I left Switzerland when I was 5. At the time I desperately wanted to go to Kindergarten, but the teacher said I was too young, I could not go. Instead my mother was encouraged to buy a lovely folder to teach the young to read and write - full of beautiful 1960s illustrations. I still have some of it. Arriving in the UK my parents were informed I would have to go to school straight away, forget Kindergarten! This found me sitting in a class where I didn't understand a word and trying to make head and tail of what was happening around me. I enjoyed my time at school immensely, mainly thanks to some wonderful teachers. I am still in touch with my former German mistress Ulli, and my piano teacher Margaret today. The funny thing is, now, 8th March 2018 finds me sitting in my grandparent's house in Switzerland having sent my kids to Kindergarten here. 

Kommentar schreiben

 
We had a lovely six-week trip to England on the Largs Bay, later used as a troop ship during the war and finally sunk. England to us was like a fairytale country; it was just like being told, "you are now travelling to fairy land". England was so green; there were no snakes, no bushfires, nothing to be frightened of. A completely and utterly safe country for me as a child. I used to have nightmares of being in Australia – but then I would wake up and think, "thank goodness, I'm not really there". I didn't like being in Australia as a child, it was terrifying for me, the only thing I liked was the sea, I think. The sharks were a long way out and on the surfing beach they had life savers – the Sydney Life Savers were very famous – tall, bronzed muscular men. Whenever a shark's fin was seen out beyond the bathing portion of the surf, which was watched continually, the big bell was rung and everyone had to rush in from the water. We used to go in the water despite the seaweed sometimes there. Large seaweed with big pellets you could pop. Once, I remember, I felt a large fish, it can't have been a shark; we would have seen a fin, it moved all along the side of my body. Anyway, I came straight in; we couldn't see what it was because of the seaweed. The seaweed smelt like anything up on the beach when the tide came in.

We left Sydney to go to England on the 15 August 1933, a very sad occasion. It took us six weeks to reach England on the ship. Everyone came to see us off. My Grandmother was there, Aunt Dorothy and cousin Ann. My mother wore a hat and her snow leopard cape – it was in the middle of the so-called winter in Sydney, don't forget – so we all had hats on. We held bunches of flowers in our hands and all looked very lugubrious and downcast. Then the time came to go and everybody had to leave, Granny and Aunty Dorothy and Ann all returned to the dock and everybody on the boat threw streamers. The streamers fell from the ship to the dockside and were held by the people staying behind, till the ship moved away, when the streamers broke. Aunt Dorothy, Granny and Ann got into their car (it was the old Essex car my mother had learnt to drive in) and drove off as quickly as they could to the Heads, the big cliffs guarding the entrance of Sydney Harbour. They had a large tablecloth with them and as the ship drew out of the harbour into the open sea we could see tiny figures on the South Head waving this huge tablecloth – it looked like a little handkerchief in the distance. That was the real start of our ship's journey to England.

We shared a four-berth cabin; Richard and I had the top berths and our parents the lower berths. There was a spare cabin opposite, just across the passageway, which my father tipped the steward heavily to use. It’s always the thing to do, tip the steward heavily at the beginning of a voyage, then you receive good attention during the journey. So we had this additional cabin, which no one was using, where we could store our extra luggage. It was a great help. To start off with, Mummy, Richard and I were all seasick. We didn't feel very good for the first three days. My father was used to travelling by ship between Australia and Fiji, so he didn't turn a hair. Our first stop was Adelaide – I don't remember much about Adelaide, then on to Melbourne, where we disembarked and visited my Aunty Georgie – my father's sister working as a journalist with a big newspaper in Melbourne. She had a family in Tasmania with three children, but she was very independent, so she was always off doing things on her own. We visited the newspaper printing works with her. That was the first and only time we ever saw her. She wrote the most amazing letters to us in England, very funny and in not very polite language – she was always furious about various things.

The next stop was Freemantle, the port of Perth. We didn't go up to Perth, just wandered around Freemantle. Then we sailed on to Colombo where we visited the Galle Face Hotel, a very famous hotel down on the beach and watched snake charmers and somebody doing the Indian rope trick. My father bought some brass trays – he was very fond of brass, real Ceylon brass – not brass made in Birmingham and exported to the Colonies. The beautiful tray I have here in my flat in Vienna is one of these. We went swimming – the children at least, I don’t think our parents joined us.

Onwards through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to Alexandria. There are photographs of us there, standing in front of the memorial to the Australian soldiers killed fighting in the First World War in Egypt. My mother's brother, Uncle Wallace, was shot down over Turkey somewhere; I’ve mentioned him before. It was very hot there. Then off we sailed again to the next port of call – Malta. I enjoyed Malta. Through the Mediterranean to Gibraltar where we saw boys diving for coins.

It was very stormy up through the Bay of Biscay until we landed at Southampton, six weeks after setting sail. When it was very rough all the tablecloths were clamped down in the restaurant and you held on tight and hoped your plate didn't slide off the table. We had several sittings for meals, with the passengers from the various decks having their meals at different times, as it was a one-class ship. My mother had brought large tins with very luscious prunes with her on the journey because we loved prunes. We used to have prunes instead of chocolate after meals as our sweet. Life on board for the children was great fun. We had parties – fancy dress parties with costumes made out of crepe paper. I was a Pierrot in a black and white cape; my brother went as a pirate. There were deck games to play – shuffleboard, deck tennis, quoits[1]. My mother was a very good sportswoman – she won all the prizes for deck tennis. There were a friendly group of officers on board who objected to their ship being called a boat, we always used to call it a boat, “no, we mustn't say that, it’s a SHIP”. There were also a number of Rhodes scholars on board travelling to Oxford. One of these young men, John Lewis, was later a rower in the Cambridge Boat Race during his studies in Oxford. That was a great excitement, to know somebody who was actually in the crew of the Oxford Boat. There was a small swimming pool on the Largs Bay, a primitive canvas rig, for the children. We children did some naughty things – a big hold with a huge grating to it on the top deck was perfect for dropping things down on the people walking beneath, through the holes. We saw dolphins not very far away, but we didn't see any sharks. It was a very pleasant time during which my mother made friends with various English ladies. Another family were going to England to consult a doctor about their son. The father was an anthropologist in New Guinea, a very nice family. Various people wrote things in my autograph book during the voyage. In the afternoons we had afternoon tea on deck, China tea, with lemon in it, served with sandwiches by the steward. I always remember the China tea.

[1] Quoits: a game in which quoits (rings of iron, plastic etc.) are tossed at a stake in the ground in attempts to encircle it.

Kommentar schreiben

11 February 2003

I’ve spent the morning in conversation with Axel from Project Theater, an experimental theatre group in Vienna. They are staging a performance by Eva Brenner. It’s all about the coming to terms with the heritage of the Second World War; her grandfather was presumably Jewish and hid it successfully. I translated it into English. From now on I’m also responsible for their English homepage maintenance. I’m trying to write June’s story, paint the almost extinct speciality shop owners of Vienna, the kind I’ve only ever seen here, keep house (I’m not really earning anything, so I feel I ought to) and organise my wedding. I decide, ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ and call Sophie. I join her and Abigail for lunch. We end up talking about my hen night. We discuss gifts. I say I don’t want a hen night with tacky sex-toy gifts, I’d rather a “bridal shower” as we are all international these days. But I also don’t wish to appear greedy, I don’t want people to feel I’m asking too much, after all we are already asking for cash contributions as our wedding gift. But if we buy the house… They end up convincing me to set up a short wedding list at WMF on the Mariahilferstrasse. We spend a few minutes looking at what’s on offer and then ask for help. The older assistant responsible for wedding lists doesn’t walk towards us, we have to go up to her, I wonder when people will become more service-orientated here. However, she finds us a nice young girl who also speaks excellent English, so all of us can communicate. I end up with a list containing such items as a steamer, a pressure cooker, glasses. I wonder whether I’ll really use the pans, if they were the right choice. If they’ll fit in my kitchen. When I email Michael he seems to think it’s a good idea. I don’t like practical things, but they do make your life easier, whereas new clothes or pretty china make it more beautiful.

Kommentar schreiben

8 March 2018

Re-reading this makes me a little sad. I have lost touch with Sophie and Abigail. Abigail had a happy family of her own with three children, and was the first of my friends - though by then I had lost touch with her too - to loose her life to cancer. I will always remember my hen night in her flat with the beautiful black and white floor.  

Kommentar schreiben

We arrived in Southampton and traveled to London by train. In London my mother rushed up to the first policeman she saw and, almost embracing him, said “how lovely it is to be in London!” She was very excited. She'd last been to England with her family in 1911, aged about 18. First we went to stay with Aunty Ruby, my Grandmother's sister. Therefore she was a Camois and she was married to Arthur Murray. They lived in Elstree where the famous film studios were before the war. Anyway, Uncle Arthur was Agent to Lord Aldenham, a very good position looking after Lord Aldenham’s estate which came with a lovely house. We stayed there for a few days, then we stayed in a little inn on the edge of the Elstree reservoir, till Daddy made up his mind where we were going to go and what we were going to do. He had some friends in Sussex, the Malcombes, whom he had known very well in India, so he paid them a visit in Crawley Down. He was thinking, ‘what am I going to do, what kind of business am I going to start up?’ One day, in London, he saw some new fangled dry-cleaning apparatus in a big window. It was called the Burtol, a new dry-cleaning system for clothes – you could have your clothes cleaned (using trichlor ethylene) and pressed and ready for collection within six hours. He did some research and went to see the managers of the firm. It was run by retired admirals and he thought, ‘if retired admirals can run dry-cleaning businesses so can I’. We settled in Crawely Down, where his friends the Malcombes lived. My father rented premises and set up his dry cleaning business with this Burtol in the window – you could see the clothes revolving and this attracted everybody's attention. Clothes could be brought in the morning, at 9 o'clock and returned at 6 o'clock in the evening. It was called the “Six-Hour Cleaners” and was quite successful during the war, as people were unable to buy new clothes owing to clothing rationing and so had their existing wardrobe cleaned on a regular basis. We rented a little cottage called Privets on the side of this huge, big lovely field with bluebells and primroses in the spring and an enormous beach tree in the middle. The cottage had no electricity, no gas, but it had a heating stove, which heated the water so we enjoyed lovely hot baths. There were two bedrooms upstairs; I shared one with my brother. There was a bathroom and a heating cupboard, which warmed all the linen. We had oil lamps and cooked by an extremely efficient oil stove. Everything worked out very well, as we didn't mind not having electric lamps. I can still remember the smell of the oil lamps and the warm linen cupboard. There was even an old-fashioned bake house in the garden where they used to bake the bread. It was a very old cottage, owned by a Mrs Monnington, a very nice lady; she had a beautiful big house on the other side of the field. We lived there for about a year, then we found another place up at Hophurst Hill, a newly built house, the first in a row of three, for the sum of 50 Pounds a week. The rent stayed at that level well into the sixties. A house with electricity, though also no gas, so we were still cooking on an oil stove.

There was the question of schools. First my parents thought I should go to school in East Grinstead, but they didn't like the look of that school very much. My mother met some pleasant people, a Mrs Waller who sent her daughter to a school in Horley, on the other side of Gatwick, St Joan’s School. She took three girls to school every day by car and brought them home again at the end of the day. We went to look at this school and it was decided that I should go there. Mrs Waller would pick me up every morning at 20 past 8; school started at 9, and then brought me home at 4 o'clock in the evening. Hophurst Hill was about half an hour away from our former home, Privets, on foot. After moving there I used to meet Mrs Waller at the crossroads. She served us tea, brown bread and honey at her place after school, then I caught the five-twenty bus home. It was already pitch black and walking along this pitch-black road in winter you could only see the road by looking at the tops of the trees against the sky. Where the trees curved you knew the road went that way. There was no light, no nothing. After Patience, Mrs Waller's daughter, left school there were no more lifts, so I caught the steam train from Grange Road at 5 past 8 in the morning as far as Three Bridges and changed, waited for the London train, disembarked at Horley and caught the bus that dropped me off outside the school. In the evening the same journey in reverse. On Thursday’s the train used to stop at Gatwick because that was “Race Day”. There was a famous racecourse there, which was used by the Canadian Air Force to repair and maintain their planes during the war. It was turned into Gatwick Airport after the war. Then I no longer needed to catch the train as a bus service was established from Horley and came right past our house making my journey much easier.

It was very difficult to get used to school in England to start with. On hearing I came from Australia, they used to say, “but you’re white! There are only Aborigines living in Australia!” Richard, at a boy’s prep school, Fonthill, was bullied about his Australian accent and called a “convict”. The teaching methods were completely different. There was a lot of writing. In Australia we had to learn for History, Geography and so on and were heard the next day to see if we knew it. Teaching was more or less on a learning basis, with writing homework. In England you were lectured at, you had to take notes, then write it out and you were marked on what you had written down. We didn't have as many textbooks as in Australia. It was a small school in a country house with two large tennis courts and a lovely garden; there was a hockey field down the road where we played hockey in the winter. I hated it because I couldn't run fast enough, so I was always playing the back position. In summer we swam in a nearby swimming pool. We used to have tennis tournaments and hockey matches with various other schools. In England they used to say, “we’ll play tennis this evening”, but what they really meant was this afternoon. Anything later than three o’clock was ‘in the evening’. I was never very good at playing tennis, so I hoped I never had to be in a tennis match. I think I was once, and we lost that tournament. I couldn’t focus properly – my eyes were bad. We played most sports in teams against other schools and as we weren’t a very large school nearly everybody had to take part. I enjoyed tennis, but I wasn't very good. We staged plays; we did Hiawatha, by Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, all dressed up as Indians. I think I was Hiawatha, I was so tall I was probably the man. We had school fetes every year where we made and sold things and all the parents came.

The school had two head mistresses. Miss Morgan, who had a BA – a very good degree in those days – was very tall and very thin and always wore a brown coat and skirt. The other head mistress, Miss Wright, had two costumes – one red coat and skirt and one green. In those days everyone wore coats and skirts and they were also called so, I suppose nowadays you would call it a suit. Miss Ford taught us French before the French lady came; our French accent wasn't very accomplished. Miss Carnie taught us Maths; we had Scripture lessons – the usual kind of lessons. We were all working for the School Certificate, which you took at 16, and was a kind of leaving certificate. If you wanted to go to university you had to take a higher one, probably the Higher Certificate, but I had no university ambitions. Some of the girls went on, but not very many of them. At sixteen I left school after obtaining School Certificate, it was quite easy. I remember being enthralled, reading ‘Gone with the Wind’ that summer. It disturbed my revision work for the exam, but anyway, I came through all right. Results came out, if you took the Oxford or Cambridge Certificate, in “The Times” or “The Daily Telegraph”, so we always had to read the newspapers to see whether one had got through or not.

There was a very nice girl at school from Hagen in Westphalia, Germany, called Ruth Heisterkamp. She looked after the younger children. She was great fun, so I thought I would like to learn German. Consequently, I learnt German from her and had German lessons. I didn't like French and found German much easier and much nicer. I decided I would like to go to Germany for six months, so she arranged for me to go to stay with this German family in Hagen on leaving school. One day we went to Wimbledon with her, with the whole school class, to watch the tennis. When Ruth opened the carriage door, she said in a very loud voice, probably thinking that no-one would understand, "hier stinkts!" – which of course everybody understood – stinks is exactly the same in English as in German. There were horrified faces inside when we all boarded this smelly carriage. It was probably the smoking carriage. Ruth Schau her name is now, she was a pretty, tall girl. I’m still in touch with her; she rings me up every now and again. She's over 80 now, has two daughters and lives in Hagen.

I left school in 1938 when there was all this business about Munich and Hitler and a great deal of trouble with Chamberlain. But before that started, I departed for a holiday with my Aunt Cora, my father's sister, moved to England just before we did with her daughter Joyce. She rented a very posh house in Chester Street in the centre of London, not far from Buckingham Palace, where she let out rooms, which she wasn't allowed to do, to various Australians who were over on visits. Aunty Cora was a great character and nothing could stop her. This summer she organised a trip to Capri. My school friend, Sonja Kinahan (we called her Sonie) and I went with various other young people. Sonie married one of the men also on that trip later. Ten or twelve of us we were in total, travelling by train. Our first decantation was Paris. Once we arrived there we had to wait till the night train to Rome left departing around 1 o'clock in the morning. To pass the time we all went to the Folies Bergeres, probably quite shocking – the first time I saw all these almost naked ladies on the stage with just feathers in front of them, it was great fun. We boarded the train – no sleepers of course – and sat up in the corners trying to go to sleep. I remember seeing mountains for the first time when we approached Switzerland, I was quite excited never having seen anything like this before. Cora was a great sport and had brought along a little spirit stove. She was always making tea for us in the carriage with methylated spirit, in little blocks, which one lit. We bought sandwiches at the various stations till we reached Rome. We spent one night in Rome and saw a little of the Coliseum and some churches. Then we took the train down to Naples where we spent a day and went out to Pompeii – only male members of the party were allowed into certain villas to see mosaics not suitable for ladies’ eyes! I remember the flies and the heat there, it was terrible. Then we took the boat over to Capri, where we remained for a whole week.

Capri was lovely, the bathing was wonderful. We took a boat into the Blue Grotto, it was quite fascinating. We walked up to Tiberius' villa, at one end of the island, and of course to Axel Munthe’s wonderful villa and gardens overlooking the sea, where I slipped and dislocated my knee for the second time. The first time it happened we were ice-skating – my mother was very keen on skating and we had plenty of ponds in Crawley Down. Whenever the ponds froze over we had to go skating. She still had her old skating boots from the 1911 tour and we children had skates strapped onto our ordinary shoes. Anyway, I wasn't very good at skating and dislocated my knee – that was the first time at Felbridge in 1934. The second time was in Axel Munthe's villa, in Capri, where I slipped. It wasn't considered very bad in those days, they bound it up and that was that. During our holiday in Capri I ate veal for the very first time. Veal was something you didn't have in England, it was very exotic. We were staying on the lower levels of Capri and saw the Duke of York's yacht sail in, from a distance – no it was the Duke of Kent I think. Mummy saw the Duke of York with his bride, later the Queen Mum, when they were first married and in Tasmania on an official visit. My parents were there on a holiday visiting my father’s sister Georgie and went to the Governor’s Ball. My mother was very keen on dancing as close as she could to the Duke and Duchess, because the Duchess was so beautiful. She always told us the Duchess was so pretty when she was a young girl. My mother was quite horrified in Tasmania – you could still see all the convict prisons, the prisons that the poor little children were imprisoned in, the child convicts sent to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread. You could still see all these things in the 1920’s; it wasn't so long ago after all.

Kommentar schreiben

9 March 2018
Reading this through again makes me nostalgic. Such fun, carefree days. June still as large as life. happy hours spent with her in her lovely flat. I don't want to turn the clock back, I do love the fact that I have two gorgeous children, the beautiful home we have made for ourselves in Switzerland. But, oh the carefree time! 

June passed away on 10th October 2010 at 10am in her 90th year. I traveled to her funeral-memorial service at Christ Church Vienna from Switzerland and it was wonderful to see the family and friends congregated there. June never questioned her faith, and "slipped away peacefully and in quiet expectation of what she used to can 'heaven'." She donated her body for anatomical research. She was always quietly moving forwards. 

Kommentar schreiben

4. Germany 1938-1939

We came back to England from Capri – the whole trip cost 11 Pounds in those days, ten days for 11 Pounds, it was quite extraordinary. On returning, the political situation in Europe worsened, Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain met Hitler in Bonn, "Peace in our Time". I'd planned to go to Germany in September. Everything finally calmed down after Chamberlain returned from this meeting with Hitler and I set off for Germany, with my luggage packed in a large trunk, to stay with the Funcke family in Hagen in Westphalia. My father came with me and we travelled across the Channel by boat, taking the train to Cologne where we spent the first night. I remember the coffee house smelt of cigar smoke and the newspapers people were reading were kind of wired onto wooden stands – something that never existed in England. At the hotel I was determined to have a bath, so I asked the maid in my best German, practised beforehand, “please, may I have a bath?” The bathroom was locked and you had to ask. She looked at me and unlocked the door and I was allowed to do so. The next day we continued by train to Hagen where we were met by the Funcke family. My father stayed for a couple of days and he and Frau Funcke understood each other very well, she was very attracted to my father, she thought he was a very nice English gentleman. Herr Funcke had died in 1919 during the terrible influenza epidemic, so she brought up the three children on her own. Their English wasn't too bad, but I was supposed to be learning German. Their daughter, Christel, was one year older than I; she'd already done her Arbeitsdienst, and was going to university later. Her brother Paul was at university in Berlin studying engineering and her younger brother, Joachim, was still at school and a member of the Hitler Youth. I remember having to say "Heil Hitler" to everybody, which I tried to avoid as much as I could. Christel gave me German lessons and we went shopping together. I recall the hats people wore, funny pointed hats made of felt – as was fashionable in Germany before the war. They had nice paper things, lovely writing paper, silver things, many different things to those in England, which I found very interesting.

Christel possessed a gramophone on which she used to play Zarah Leander songs; 'Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt...'. She was a Swedish singer with a very deep exotic voice. 'Kann die Liebe Sünde sein' was her other famous song. Just before Christmas we made a trip to Berlin to visit Christel’s brother Paul and went to a student's ball there. That was a bit awkward, as I couldn't understand very much of what any of the young men were saying though my German was improving slowly but surely. Paul came by as I was sitting with some young man who was telling me stories in German to which I was saying "Ja, ja" the entire time, not really understanding what he was talking about. Paul said, "you must come away, you mustn't listen to all that, you're saying "ja, ja" to the most unsuitable things!" During this week in Berlin we went to see the famous museum with the relics Lehmann had brought back from Troy. We saw Hitler's great Olympic stadium, which was very impressive. We visited Christel's cousin – they gave a Saint Nikolaus party – it was the first time I'd seen Father Christmas dressed up as St. Nikolaus. I was there for Christmas, which was quite impressive and very nice. The Funcke's had a beautiful Christmas tree. The presents were not wrapped up, they were placed on a big table with names on them. On Christmas Eve we went to visit the cemetery where all the graves had candles on them, it seemed to be a custom in Germany. I was very impressed and wrote to my mother saying it had given me a wonderful feeling to see this cemetery all lit up with the millions of candles. My mother thought going to the cemetery on Christmas Eve was very peculiar; she didn't understand that at all!

We visited another cousin who was in the SS, which didn't mean very much to me in those days. He was just about to go off to Prague – the Germans marched into Czechoslovakia in 1938. After the war he was in prison for quite a long time, he died a sick man. I met him again when I visited Christel in the late 1970s. He was imprisoned for being a member of the SS; I don't think he'd done anything terribly awful. In Germany at that time – I was there from October 1938 to April 1939 – the newspapers were full of how awful Britain was and running down Churchill. Chruchill was called a 'Kriegshetzer'. I was very annoyed by all this. The Völkische Beobachter with red and black print at the top was Goebbels' mouthpiece. The Funcke's were Nazi's, in favour of the regime. The young brother Joachim was killed in the war, he was only 15 when I was there. He was called up. To be a Nazi was quite normal and natural for everybody in those days. However there was no war going on, everything had calmed down, we thought it was going to be all right.

Christel's home was a huge big house, four stories, with a Herrenzimmer, a salon, a dining room and a winter garden on the ground floor where we had our meals. Here I had to learn how to cut bread rolls. I wasn't allowed to break rolls as one does in England, they had to be cut with a knife through the middle. That was one of the lessons I've never forgotten. I had a bedroom on the first floor; the family's bedrooms were on the second floor. I was always used to sleeping with the windows open, being British, but that wasn't a good idea in Germany. I might catch a cold, it wasn't a very good thing for my health and as they were responsible for me I mustn't sleep with the window open. I tried to pretend, "all right", I put a rolled up rug down by the door so they couldn't feel the draught coming through as they walked past on their way up to their bedrooms. That didn't work, because the maid coming home from her evening out saw my bedroom window was open and reported it to Frau Funcke, who was extremely angry with me for still opening my bedroom window. I had to keep it shut after that, or only open it a quarter of an inch for some 'fresh air' as my mother would have said. The Funcke family were the 'must do this, must do that' kind of people, it was very wearying, but you got used to it.

Then I had a great excitement. In 1938 thousands of young Jewish children up to the age of seventeen and eighteen were sent to England and taken in by families. Three girls were taken into families in Crawley Down – all from Vienna. One of them, Hilda Harmel, when she knew I was going to Hagen asked if I would mind bringing something back from her parents still in Vienna. Austria and Germany were one country by this time, things could be sent by post from one place to the other. So I, not having the vaguest idea what I was doing, I said, "yes of course, I'll bring back anything you like if I can". Round about the time of my birthday in February a large parcel came for me from Vienna. I immediately thought, 'ah-ha this is the parcel from Hilda's parents from Vienna. Its obviously got precious things in it otherwise they wouldn't want me to bring it out.' I had to make up a story to tell the Funcke's who wanted to know what was in the parcel. I said I had friends in Vienna and it was a birthday present. I took it upstairs to my room and opened it. Thank goodness I didn't open it in front of them. Fortunately they hadn’t demanded it either. Inside was a red leather handbag stuffed full of jewelry, full to the top with rings, diamonds, brooches, gold bracelets. I hid everything as best I could. I took the bag downstairs and said, "my friends sent me this lovely leather bag". Vienna is very well known for its leather-work, so that was all right; they didn't suspect anything. The problem was getting it out of the country, on leaving the country your luggage was always inspected. The customs inspectors came into the house to look at your luggage, if they thought it was all right they put a lead seal on it to show that it was harmless. I hid the jewelry in pots of cream, talcum powder tins; I hid it where I thought nobody could ever find it. The customs men came in, but they didn't really examine my trunk, thank goodness, as the Funcke's were a well-known rich industrialist family in Hagen. The family firm had factories making nuts, bolts and screws – they were all bombed during the war. The old grandmother also lived in a massive house with turrets and a generous garden all round it. I have no idea where one can see the likes of it these days. Hagen was very badly bombed. You can imagine how frightened I was. If they found the jewelry I would be put in prison straight away.

Christel and I set off for England in April 1939, the plan being she would now come and stay in England for six months. My German had improved considerably and the Funcke's were very kind to me during my stay with them in Hagen. We boarded the train and reached the frontier at Aachen. The customs men looked to me like SS men in black boots and black uniforms (I was so frightened of the SS by that time, I thought everything was the SS). I thought, 'ah, now they're going to start looking at the luggage and I'll be caught and sent back again'. It was an awful moment. Christel knew none of this, nobody knew anything, I had to do it all on my own. But we came through without any impediment, reached Dover and finally London. My father met us at Victoria Station to accompany us to Crawely Down. He knew that I would be bringing something though he didn't know what. We went to have a cup of tea and I took him to one side to tell him what it was I had in my luggage. He said, "Oh, we must declare it to the English customs, we can't smuggle this into London". We left Christel on her own, not knowing what we were up to, to have our luggage looked at. My father explained the whole story. The customs man wasn't particularly interested and asked me to show the jewellery to him. But I couldn't find it, I couldn't remember where I had put it, I'd hidden it so well. It was also too complicated, I would have had to open the tins with a screwdriver; poke about in jars of face cream. He got a bit fed-up, saying, "never mind, it’s OK". I closed the case and later I gave it all to Hilda who was still living in our village. Her parents eventually reached England before the war started. They went to work as housekeepers for an aunt of mine in Suffolk. After giving Hilda all this jewellery the family said, "thank you very much" and sent me back what looked like a little necklet with very nice stones on it. When I came to Vienna I showed it to my husband, saying, "look, this is what this Jewish family gave me to say thank you for bringing all their jewels out", it turned out to be Gablonz glass, it wasn't real at all, it was just costume jewellery. That was the thank you for all my trouble. Hilda emigrated to America eventually with her parents.

During the time Christel was with us we went to London and on various other outings. To Christel the Jews were some kind of vermin, though she was quite polite to the three Jewish girls in the village. This was the attitude of Germans to Jews at that time; they wouldn't have anything to do with them. However, there was a house full of smaller Jewish children, not far from a tennis court where we used to play. Christel said, "I can't come here any longer because of all these Jewish children". So we didn't go and play tennis there any longer. That was the attitude. That was the way it was. The Funcke's were otherwise a very normal family, they weren't monsters or anything. They liked England, with the exception of Churchill, which was why Christel came to England to learn English. My opinion of Nazi Germany? It didn't impress me. 

The political situation worsened, Hitler became more aggressive, the question of the Danzig Corridor arose. Hitler wanted the Danzig Corridor – the German's outlet to the sea. There was a great fuss about it; Hitler declared he was going to march in. Britain was going to support the Poles and if Germany marched in there was going to be war. This was around June, July 1939. As the political situation was becoming increasingly dangerous Christel's mother wrote saying she must come home. Christel left England at the beginning of August 1939. War broke out on the 6 September. We listened to Chamberlain’s speech saying that war had broken out (Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940). We all sat round the wireless and everybody was pleased something was being done at last, that this awful situation wasn't going on any longer.

Kommentar schreiben

14 February 2003

I’m visiting June today. I’m running late. It’s Valentine’s Day and I quickly iced Michael’s cake before leaving. When I arrive June is looking pale and a little tired. She tells me of her morning, how she felt she was being enveloped in a black cloud, closing down over her. Waiting. I say, “you probably stood up too quickly” and it was her circulation. She normally sleeps with the inner window open (old-fashioned double glazing), but because it was so cold she closed it and didn’t wake up at her usual time with the sound of the traffic. She’s worried about dropping dead alone at home one day. I don’t want to think of June leaving yet. It’s very selfish, but I would miss her so much. We eat a piece of Lisl’s Linzer Torte and sip our instant morning coffee. I ask her my questions. We decide that, next time, when she is feeling stronger, she’ll speak some more episodes on tape. We spend the rest of the morning absorbed in photographs. Snapshots of her and Max. Max’s lady friends, his previous engagement. Pictures of the happy parents proudly holding Stephanie. “I hope Stephanie had a happy childhood”. “I’m sure she did, she always looks happy.” Nancy and her husband, Evelyn with her ‘false bosoms’ and the uncle marrying his second wife during his ‘second youth’. A blond lady marrying an elegant greying gentleman. Sigrid and Richard, “oh no, I’d rather not have a picture of her in”. We are so engrossed the time runs by. Suddenly it’s time to go to my art class and for June to eat her lunch. Hopefully not over warmed-up on the gas cooker. Short, abrupt little snores have been issuing from the room next door. We realise they’ve come to an end and Rani is also demanding her lunch, purring around our ankles. A quick rush, get the cat fed, June’s dinner on her plate, I must be off, I’m late. June looks better. She couldn't extract the photos from their storage under the TV on her own. I leave a happier, more invigorated June eating lunch. There’s colour in her cheeks again. We are both looking forward to seeing more.

Kommentar schreiben

10 March 2018

I was born in Switzerland in the summer of 1971. In the local hospital. Funnily enough my husband was born in the same place and we both have similar colour photos of a pink baby lying in a tiled corner for the first picture. We were married in Christ Church Vienna 2003 I have lovely photos of the day - of course June was there too. Now in Switzerland with two children I have completely different first pictures - Arthur was a complicated birth and so I had to be moved by ambulance to the regional hospital nearest to the antroposophical clinic where I was trying to give birth. I probably would have died before modern medicine came in. As it was the mid-wife on duty (her shift had ended and begun again by the time I was ready to leave) told me in no uncertain terms, she would have just carried out a c-section. I was lucky the doctor in charge decided to let me give birth naturally but with the help of an epidural. Olivia was born in the clinic - but again not as planned. The midwife on duty was just "helping out" and by midnight she called the one normally in charge. Her no-fuss attitude then had the whole thing happen easily and fairly quickly - but I keep thinking if she'd been on duty from the beginning, Olivia would have her birthday on the 7th July 2007, instead of being born just after midnight! They had also run out of cribs that night, and so Olivia spent her first night in an old perambulator from the clinic, though she moved to a crib with pink curtains the next day - the pink was not because she was a girl, but because that is the colour babies can see in the womb and so makes the feel at home. 

Kommentar schreiben

About half an hour after war was declared there was an air raid warning. Everybody thought the Germans had already come over and were bombing Britain, but of course they weren't. It was no air raid at all. After that nothing happened. We just waited. I was unsure of what I wanted to do, I knew I didn't want to go to university, I wasn't very academically minded, so I thought I might do a secretarial course. Then I received the offer of a job as an under matron at Richard's prep school. Fonthill was a lovely school just close by, a boy’s prep, boarding school, taking boys from five to eleven, with around 100 pupils. I thought this would be fun and I could do this for a while. I was supposed to be an under matron, but they gave me another job – I had to do all the mending; I had to mend all the tablecloths. Huge white table clothes for long school dinner tables. All the dirty tablecloths were put away till washing day and during this time mice used to get at them and knaw holes in them. When they came back from being washed and ironed the holes had to be mended. I would lay the tablecloths out on the staff dining room table to mend them. I also had to do some other sewing – curtains and suchlike, but I didn't know how to use the sewing machines, so I wasn't very good. Other duties were bath nights, see that the boys had their baths properly. I also had to take football sometimes, not knowing anything at all about football! The boys nicknamed me ‘Mount Everest’ because I was so tall.

I was there from September 1939 till the beginning of 1941. The evacuation from Dunkirk occurred in 1940, when all the British troops were evacuated with hundreds of little ships, rowing boats, sailing boats. The entire British population living along the coast with a boat went to pick people up off the coast – an armada of private boats as well as some naval vessels. Truckloads of these soldiers were driven past the school on their way to various army destinations. The school lay between London and Brighton thus en route for the Red Cross and army trucks filled with soldiers. Most of the British Expeditionary Forces returned safely.

When the flying bombs arrived we had to carry out night watch, fire watching on the roof of the school every so often. Everybody took it in turns. A few bombs were dropped round about but not very many. The flying bombs would pass by overhead and were called 'buzz bombs'. They were only dangerous if they stopped a little while before they got to you – that meant the bomb was going to drop. If it passed over that was all right and when it stopped somewhere else it meant it was dropping on somebody else. When the buzz bombs came over you hoped they would pass by and not stop before they reached you. Once, at Christmas time, we went carol singing, though of course everything was blacked out. We sang in front of one lady's door and she became very agitated. "Why are you doing this, you shouldn't be, the Germans will hear you up in their aeroplanes!" She thought we shouldn't be carol singing, it was a very dangerous thing, it might attract the bombs! A bomb was actually dropped and we all threw ourselves into the ditch, but nothing happened. The bombers were probably just dropping their bombs before they left the country, just like the Americans did here in Austria, to get rid of them, and not bombing anything in particular in Sussex. An awful lot of bombing went on in London, Plymouth, Coventry - that was the first big raid, in Coventry, when the Cathedral was damaged. That's when the British took revenge and bombed Berlin, I think. Anyhow, this is not a record of the bombing during the war. I was at Fonthill and I enjoyed it. It was hilarious with all those boys; they were so funny. We had a little chapel there, where we went to Church every Sunday. I had half a day off every week when I went home, met my mother. We would go into East Grinstead and have tea. I was paid exactly one Pound a week, which was pocket money as I was living there. We listened to the news every evening; they used to play the national anthems of all the countries conquered by Germany – the Poles, the French – at 9 o'clock every night. We all stood up and solemnly listened to the music. Afterwards the news was read, and then we would go to bed

The Sealy's were a nice family and owned Fonthill School. Pat Sealy was the younger daughter of the headmaster and his wife. Lizzy, her elder sister, attended St. James’ Secretarial School in London. She was two years older than Pat, had already completed her schooling and was in London for her training. Pat, when she left school, joined the WRNS (The Women's Royal Naval Service). WAFS were the Women's Air Force Service; the ATS were the Women's Territorial Army Service – the Auxiliary Territorial Service it was called. I didn't think I wanted to join any of those, but I couldn't stay on at Fonthill any longer, I had to do something, one couldn't just spend life sitting there. I thought I'd take a secretarial course, having heard all about it from Lizzy. Mrs Hoster’s was supposed to be the second very best secretarial collage in London, but they had been evacuated to Tunbridge Wells. This wasn't very far from where we were living in Sussex, so I went over to see them. My parent’s supported this and I started the course in the spring of 1941. I joined the college at Tunbridge Wells, but it only lasted about one month, then the Canadians requisitioned the house. The Canadians were in Britain, supporting us against the Germans; America wasn't in the war yet. The house was requisitioned, so we were sent home till they found another house. This was duly found in Suffolk, Grantham, a massive old country house, a mansion, where I then completed my six months secretarial course. The family who owned it, the Fitzwilliams, lived in the Dower House, the smaller, but still large house, to the side. Major Fitzwilliam was a very tall man; his sons were in the army, all except one, who was at the Savoy Hotel learning hotel management. While I was there the Americans entered the war, it must have been September 1941, Pearl Harbour.

We took our bicycles with us to Grantham to go on rides at the weekends; we used to go bathing, digging in the vegetable garden. Doing what we could whilst learning. We had to learn typing with our gas masks on, in case there was an air raid, and always had to carry our gas masks around with us in little boxes. I will always remember typing blind (you couldn't wear your glasses under the masks) to some American march music on the gramophone. It was quite ridiculous, but anyhow. That was right at the beginning (1941), one didn't take it so seriously later. It was an enjoyable time altogether. I learnt to type, take shorthand and German shorthand, committee procedure and all the kinds of things you would need if you obtained a good job. Mrs Hoster’s had an office in London, where, after you'd finished the six month’s course with her, one would go and work for a month to learn real office work. In London I stayed with the Cripps family for this month, with Blanche Cripps. Blanche was a cousin of Elsie Cripps, who was at school with me. Blanche, after a university course, also went to Mrs Hoster’s and was now also completing her office training in London. Her uncle was Sir Stafford Cripps, a great socialist and minister in the government. Elsie, during our school days at St Joan’s in Horley, was a great admirer of Mussolini; she wasn't quite such an admirer of Hitler. She was always writing Mussolini letters and receiving answers in return. She tried to interest me in political matters – all of Mussolini's aims and ambitions and to read Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. I tried to read it in English, but I didn't get very far, I wasn't interested in politics in the slightest.

Mrs Hoster’s' aim was to obtain good jobs for her girls, they went into the best jobs in the Ministries and I don't know what. First I had an interview with Lady Davidson, an MP in Parliament. A very nice person, she wanted me as a private secretary. However, I thought that wasn't such a good idea, I could still be called up, as it wasn't an important war job. Called up to join a factory, join the Red Cross, do war work, so I didn't take it. My friend Lucie was in the Land Army, working with the farmers, learning how to do farm work. All the male farm workers were called up so women had to take their place. Then I saw an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph. People were wanted as secretaries for the Australian Air force now quartered in London. I thought, 'ah Australian Air force, having been born in Australia, that's probably a good idea'. I travelled to London with my mother. She came with me, because I, of course, was terrified. I was interviewed and they said, "yes that's fine, you can start on..." probably November, December 1941. So I worked at this Australian Air Force H. Q., staying with Auntie Ruby at Elstree and travelling in by tube every day. However, I didn't like it at all, it was quite horrible! I didn't like the girls, I didn't like the men, I didn't like the work – typing long lists of air force men who were coming over from Australia. It was awfully boring, it wasn't a proper secretarial job, it was a typist job. I thought, ‘I’m not a typist’. I was very unhappy.

I rang up Mrs Hoster’s and said, "would it be possible for you to find me another job, because this is not my line of work at all". At that time a law was going to come into force on a certain date that, if you hadn't a job, or were going to change your job, you had to go and work in a factory. I desperately wanted to get myself into another job before this law came into force otherwise I would probably have to go into a factory. Mrs Hoster’s weren't very pleased; they said they would get a bad reputation if their girls changed their jobs so quickly. I said, "you didn't get me this job to start off with, so maybe you can find me something else".

Kommentar schreiben

18 February 2003

June calls me at 9:00 this morning and asks me to purchase some things from the pharmacy. I’m still in bed – one of the advantages of not having to “go to the office”. I arrive in Hietzing with her requests. She opens the door looking very regal, she’s had her hair done, and it’s definitely a “big hair day”. I’m somewhat intimidated and feel I have to be on my very best behaviour. I tell her this and she laughs and says, “yes its very high, isn’t it? A new girl did it”. I think I prefer her “au natural”. She’s been reading the six chapters and says I probably won’t find anyone to print it, “no thank you, they’ll say”. The style is too monotonous. Not very beautifully written. I try not to feel upset and say, “that’s what I like about it, its different from the others, more immediate”. We eat chocolate cake, the remains from her birthday, and discuss how today it’s very difficult to see the situation in Austria prior to the Second World War objectively. Only one side of the argument can be presented these days. The full picture is carefully eliminated; it’s impossible to say how it really was.

We speak about the American and the British soldiers, the British Tommy’s with their nailed boots, one heard them coming down the road, the Americans with their soft rubber soles. How convoys were sent to the US soldiers stationed in the UK carrying coca-cola and ice-cream. With these precious goods they would endeavour to outmanoeuvre the submarine blockade round the country. Of course they were loved by the girls, providing stockings and cigarettes as they did.

June has made several alterations to the text, and also remembered new episodes to be included. Before moving onto the photos she speaks some more incidents onto tape. I then bring out the albums again and we immerse ourselves in the visual past. June is happy, relaxed, with fond memories as she looks at the pictures and explains who the people are captured in monochrome. She remembers nearly every name. There is a photo of a happy June sitting on the mountainside, hand in hand with a very attractive young man. “He went back to his wife”. June in various inelegant skiing poses in the Dolomites and pictures of the ruined Gloriette monument in Schönbrunn. The Russian checkpoint at Semmering. I look at my watch and can hardly believe one and a half hours have flown away. Its seven thirty and time to go.

Later, Michael and I sit in the “local colour” restaurant on our street, the last guests, and order boiled beef with apple-horseradish sauce and rösti. A typical Viennese meal. I show him the few photos I selected as possibilities for this story; the paper they are glued onto is crumbling to pieces. Post-war paper. 

Kommentar schreiben

I left the Australians after being with them for about a month or six weeks, and received a letter from Mrs Hoster’s asking ‘would I like to go and work at 10 Downing Street?’ This was very thrilling, to think I could go and work at Downing Street and the Prime Minister’s Office. "Yes please!" and I went up for an interview. I was interviewed by Miss Stenhouse, she was in charge of the staff, in the Annex – all 10 Downing Street offices were moved to the Annex, part of the Treasury Building, just across the road from St. James' Park. 10 Downing Street had been slightly bomb shaken and it wasn't safe to live in any longer. The Prime Minister had his Annex in the Treasury Buildings in Great George Street as he was also First Lord of the Treasury. He had his flat there and adjoining his flat were the offices.

I had to wait till they did all the security checks to prove I wasn't spying for the Germans or anything like that. In the end they said, "yes, you can start". First I stayed with Lizzy Sealy from Fonthill, she was working at the so-called War Office. I found out later it was the MI5, but one wasn't allowed to know that. She lived in a big flat shared on Cromwell Road with 3 medical students and I could stay there until I joined the shift system at the office. The shift system was 48 hours on duty and 48 hours off. However, for the first month, I had to be on days. In the flat there was an enormous television set – it wasn't working, but this huge machine, it must have been one of the very first, was in the sitting room. So I lived on Cromwell Road and went to the office every day.

Everyone was very kind and friendly at the Private Office. It was like heaven after the Australians. There were Miss Stenhouse, her nickname was Mags, because her initials were MAG Stenhouse, Miss Chown and Miss Summers, Miss Watson who did the parliamentary questions. I came to know all these people within a month, then I was put on shift duty. I had to be there by lunchtime, half past one, because it was safest to travel about then – no bombing, no air raids. We started work at half past one for two days then we went off duty at half past one again. We were on shift at weekends, sometimes at Christmas, it depended on one’s shift duty.

Our office was upstairs on the first floor of the Annex. The male Private Secretaries' offices were downstairs on the ground floor, adjoining the Prime Minister’s flat: John Peck (Foreign Affairs), Anthony Bevir (Church matters), Desmond Brown (junior), Leslie Rowan (General) and John Martin (Principle Private Secretary); others who also worked in the offices were Commander Thompson (Travel and Transport), Inspector Thompson (security bodyguard), Lord Moran (PM’s doctor) and Lord Cherwell (originally German, advised on scientific matters). They were mostly foreign office men who were seconded to the Prime Minister. Miss Watson was the parliamentary private secretary, various others, Miss Stenhouse, her friend Gwen, they were all known by their Christian names, were in charge of the confidential filing. Various different types of filing went on, on the ground floor, behind the Prime Minister's flat. We girls expanded so much we had to move up a floor and relocate to the first floor where there was more room. They built a little staircase we had to unlock to use and go down to take dictation. We worked for the private secretaries – typed their letters, took dictation, did all the honours lists, the parliamentary questions. It was very interesting; we knew everything that was going on. For example, “Overlord” was the code name for the invasion into France that brought about the end of the war. After the invasion, “D” Day in 1944, we had to go to the underground map room between 7:30 and 8:00 in the morning to take dictation from the officer in charge. He’d say where all the battles were, how far the troops had come. We then had to type it up, and it was given to the Prime Minister with his breakfast. One had to sign the Official Secrets Act before beginning to work there – one was not allowed to write a diary or tell anybody at all what happened during the 48 hours one was at work, or what one’s work entailed. I stuck to the rules, I didn't write a diary, lots of people obviously did judging by the books written afterwards. One girl was found keeping a diary and was immediately dismissed. Lizzie Layton has written a very interesting book; she was Churchill’s personal private secretary. She was Canadian and wrote letters to her mother telling her all about what was going on in lieu of writing a diary. It probably went over in the official mail, which is why it was not censored. Her mother returned the letters to her, and she published them as a book. I read it again recently. It brought back lots of memories.

All the post came to us first. We would open the post and pass it to the appropriate private secretary to deal with. Some of it we dealt with ourselves, sent little 'thank you' acknowledgement letters. This was the job of first person on duty at 8.30 in the morning, who also had to listen to the telephone, take in whatever was going on. The other girls generally turned up between 9 and half past and some of us came on duty at 8.30, some at 10 o'clock. Normally civil service office hours didn't start till 10 o'clock every morning, that was the normal office time, but they went on till 6, 7, 8 or 9 in the evening. Those that had been up on very late duty the night before came in at 10. There were five of us on a shift; I was with Freddie Lowe, who then went out to North Africa, to Cairo with the War Office, in the Ministry of State's Office. My shift consisted of Marion Holmes, Joan Graves, Freddy Smith, Freddie Lowe and the Head of the shorthand-writers’ office, where we worked, was Sheila Minto. All very pleasant people and they became good friends, especially Marion and Freddy Lowe. The messengers in the office were pensioned-off Marines and were oldish men over 50. They carried messages from one room to the next, very flat footed and always wearing their caps whilst on duty. They used to make tea for us, bringing us tea and biscuits in the afternoon at Number 10. We also had an office girl that did some filing and other things we asked her, and made us coffee in the morning. Her name was Edna, I remember. In the evening, the Prime Minister went over from 10 Downing Street to the Annex for his dinner, prepared by the cook, Mrs Landau. We were allowed to use their refrigerator, if necessary.

All the unimportant documents were filed in our office. For every telegram we had to make 10 copies for the files with flimsies and carbon paper. If we had more than 10 we had to cut a stencil as we didn't have any Gstettner (a copying machine). I will explain the workings of this antiquated duplication method, which was required if we had to make more than ten carbonic copies on very thin paper. The duplicator consisted of a shallow box with a fine wire screen attached at one end. The foolscap size copying paper was laid into the box, the screen put down on top, then the previously cut stencil onto the screen, and a well inked roller rolled over the stencil several times. The screen was lifted up, the copy removed and the procedure repeated until the required number of copies had been made. The thick black ink was in a very large tube and after frequent applications our hands were no longer very clean! In the end we acquired a Gstettner, making life much easier. Of course it wasn't electric; it was rolled by turning it with a handle. When it was delivered the man said the best method of cleaning it was with Coca-Cola!

We had sleeping quarters for the night during the shift. First we slept upstairs, on the same floor as our office. Then the bombing worsened and our sleeping quarters were moved into the depths. There are at least two floors down under these buildings. The first level down was where the War Cabinet met in the evenings; it was the safe place for the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in case of bombings. Our sleeping quarters were one depth lower, in the cellars if you wish to call it so. Our quarters had bunk beds, air-conditioning, a telephone – the person on duty could be called up at any time in the night to use the teleprinter, take shorthand, carry out any necessary work. One private secretary always stayed till the Prime Minister went to bed, which was very late, usually at one or two in the morning. Once when it was my turn to get up should anything happen, the telephone rang. "The Prime Minister wishes to dictate". So, there was I in my dressing gown, going upstairs, in fear and trembling, because Churchill was a very difficult man to cope with and he hated to see new faces. He had his own two personal private secretaries – Mrs Hill, who did all his memoirs, and Miss Layton. These were the two ladies he paid privately and they were always with him. Lizzy Layton, though engaged to assist Mrs Hill, always looked down on us, we were just the 'girls' because we were only in the Prime Minister's private office, and she was his personal private secretary. The rest of the staff were Civil Servants. Mrs Hill and Miss Layton took all his dictation, but when they were off duty one of us had to do the work for them. This evening I was called up because Mrs Hill didn't remain on duty late at night, Lizzy Layton was late duty, but she was off. As the Prime Minister wished to dictate, John Martin rang me saying somebody must come up, and as it was my turn, up I went. I sat there in my dressing gown with my shorthand notebook waiting in Mr Martin's room. The Prime Minister's bedroom was just next-door. We sat there and waited, then the message came through: "the Prime Minister has gone to bed, nobody is needed". Thank goodness, I could go downstairs again, my life was saved!  I don't think I could have coped. I wasn't terribly good at shorthand and sometimes had difficulty in reading it.

In the mornings the Prime Minister dictated to Lizzy Layton or Mrs Hill in bed, before going to the House of Commons. In the meantime we were doing the other work, preparing the Questions, typing up the answers to the Questions he was going to be asked in Parliament – this was Miss Watson's work. She prepared the answers from the various ministries, and then they had to be typed. All the typing was done on very large type machines, huge type which you don't normally see in an office. This was especially for the Prime Minister, as he preferred large type. After dictation he went off to the House of Commons and we stayed in the Annex. After lunch he worked at 10 Downing Street, considered safe enough in the afternoons. We had to go over there then too. The private secretaries went (two of the men, Mr Rowan, Mr Martin, Mr Brown, Mr Bevir and Mr Peck took it in turns) and they were in the office next to the Cabinet Room. Our office was next to the private secretaries' office; the various offices there were the Cabinet room, private secretaries' office for the two men, then the girl's office. Two of us always went over, plus Mrs Hill typing away and Lizzy Layton in case he wanted anything. We worked at Number 10 till eight o'clock in the evening, until the Prime Minister returned to the Annex for dinner. On one of these afternoons, when the battles were being fought in Africa – the Eighth Army was fighting Rommel's forces in the deserts of North Africa – Mr Rowan suddenly rang the bell, "come in, come in, there's a telegram that's very urgent, has to go into the Prime Minister straight away. It has to be dictated to you on the scrambler." Now the scrambler was a special green telephone that scrambled the message so no spies could listen in. The diction wasn't terribly clear. There was this man in the War Office dictating this telegram to me about the state of the battle in North Africa, with the names of various places, at great speed. I took it down as best I could, retreated into my office and sat down at the typewriter to type it down. But I couldn't read some of it, I was puzzling my brain, 'now what could that be, and what could that be?' I was getting in an awful state. Mr Rowan kept on coming in, "you've nearly finished?” "Yes, I've nearly finished". The third time he came in, he said, "don't worry, scrap it. The telegram has already come over in the box from the War Office." Why they didn't send it in the beginning I don't know. Anyhow, someone had brought over the box from the War Office, which was just round the corner, so the Prime Minister received his telegram. My life was saved once more.

I remember the battle of El Alamein – that was when the British at last won a battle, turning the tide in North Africa and beating Rommel, forcing his troops back. The telegram came in, "we have won the battle of El Alamein". That was a great day, a great triumph. All these telegrams had to be circulated to the Prime Minister. Of course he knew already, but the actual telegrams were printed out and circulated every day. On this occasion, Miss Stenhouse said, "who can draw a Union Jack?" I said I could, because I'd learnt to do that at school. I did a beautiful Union Jack in red, white and blue. All the telegrams had to be flagged - A, B, or C or whatever it was. This El Alamein victory telegram was flagged by myself, because I drew the Union Jack for the flag "we have won at last".

To reach the bathroom from our office, we had to walk through the Prime Minister's Annex, his private flat, and across an outside corridor, past the stairs leading down to the War Cabinet office. On the left was his bedroom, the dining room, Mrs Churchill's[1] bedroom; her secretary Miss Hamblin – known to everyone as “Hammy”[2] also lived there, the kitchen. Once in bathroom we were only allowed two inches of water and had to be very quick so the next person could have their bath. One night after having my bath at the end of late duty I was going down to bed, two levels below the War Cabinet office. As I was walking down the stairs the War Cabinet door opened and the War Cabinet came out, headed by the Prime Minister, followed by all the generals. There was I, trying to pretend I didn't exist, standing in the corner of the staircase bend, pressed against the wall. They all marched past me. The last one to come up was General Smuts; he was the Prime Minister of South Africa, a very nice man. General Smuts obviously saw that I was very embarrassed by all this, so he stopped and said, "oh you are lucky, I wish I were you, I wish I could be going to bed too". And then he passed on. That was really very kind of him. I was in my dressing gown made of two blue blankets, one couldn't buy material, except on coupons, so I had this beautiful long dressing gown made of blankets. It went down to the floor and buttoned up to the top, it was all quite decent. But it was very embarrassing having the Cabinet marching past me on the stairs. I shall always remember General Smuts, he was a gentleman.

Another night, when I was called up to work the teleprinter, I saw the sentry fast asleep, lying across the threshold of the Prime Minister's flat. He was supposed to be on duty with his gun. I had to report that. The security was terribly lax; anybody could have picked the lock at the back of the offices. To go to the lavatory one had to take the key and go out to the passage outside the office area, within the Treasury building. If one walked further along, down the corridor, you arrived at the canteen. These big buildings are like warrens; you can walk from one end to the next. The canteen was on the ground floor in the Treasury in St. George Street and we went there for our suppers and breakfasts. Our breakfast consisted of bacon and eggs, or whatever you wanted, such as scrambled eggs on toast. We generally went out for lunch, to some little restaurant somewhere near Piccadilly or thereabouts. There were all kinds of little restaurants and pubs where you could buy something to eat. No coupons were required in England for eating at a restaurant, unlike Austria where there was very strict rationing. Rationing at home was strict too, but not in restaurants.

When the V2 rockets started, it was all very upsetting. These were bombs that didn't make any noise, but just suddenly exploded. The V1 rockets, or “Buzz Bombs”, made a loud buzzing noise when going over, they weren’t so awful, at least one could hear them. But the V2 rocket, it went so high nobody could hear it, then it would suddenly drop and explode. One of these dropped on the Guards’ Barracks, Birdcage Walk, down the side of St. James' Park. When the air raid alarm started, big steel shutters were closed across all the windows, and we were told to go into the passageway and stand with our backs against the wall. Fortunately it didn't happen very often. I started working in the Prime Minister’s office at the beginning of 1942, so I'd passed my 21st birthday. The worst bombings in London had been during 1940 and ‘41. There were still bombings in 1942, but not to the same extent.

I was there when Hess landed. That was also great excitement. He came over on his own mission to try and negotiate with Britain to stop the war. Of course he was put in prison in England. He was in prison until he died, in Berlin, Spandau. This whole prison was run for one single man until his death, guarded by the British, the Americans, the French and the Russians. The British, I think, and the Americans would have released him, because he hadn’t done anything criminal, he just wanted to stop the war. Of course it wasn’t Churchill’s intention to stop the war, he wanted to beat Hitler. After the war Hess was condemned to life imprisonment as a war criminal, but he wasn’t put to death. There was the war in Yugoslavia when Churchill first supported Draza Mihailovic – we all had to learn how to spell his name. When Tito came into the picture he was considered a better ally, in case Mihailovic was working with the Germans – all these groups were partisans. A man was being dropped into Yugoslavia to organise the Partisans fighting with Tito, he was a Scot and he came into the office in his kilt. He was very "fesch", very handsome. He was an excitement when he came into the office and told everybody about his adventures in Yugoslavia. Brigadier Fitzroy-McLean was a famous figure, an adventurer type. We girls were always very impressed when we caught a glimpse of Fitzroy-McLean in his kilt!

When we were on duty at the weekends we sometimes used to play clock golf around the office if there wasn't much to do. It was John Peck's[3] idea of amusement, to golf around the office, upstairs and downstairs and in my lady's chamber. It relieved the monotony when there was no urgent work to do and was fun – though I don’t think one was given a prize for the least number of strokes! The Prime Minister was always away at the weekends, either at Chequers or Chartwell – his private house in Kent. Chequers is the Prime Minister’s official country house, still used by today’s Prime Ministers. He travelled down at the weekends with Commander Thompson (Royal Navy), who organised the trips, and Inspector Thompson, the policeman and bodyguard who always went with him. Mrs Hill sometimes went, as did Lizzy Layton or Marion and one other secretary. So being on duty at weekends wasn't as strenuous, unless one had to take scrambler dictation from Chequers, always very difficult to understand. We did not like those green scrambler telephones!

Another side of office life was to prepare all the Honours Lists. We had recommendations from various Governmental departments and municipal offices, the Foreign Office etc. All submissions for an Honour had to be checked up on and approved by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister also had his own Honours List. The Honours Lists were then submitted to the King, George VI, for approval and signature. These letters to the King had to be typed with no mistakes, no erasions, they had to be immaculate. We always had to take great care when writing letters to the King.  After the Birthday and New Year Honours Lists were published they had to be typed up for reference and the titles used when addressing letters to anyone of importance.

In our office was a very new invention President Roosevelt had given the Prime Minister, an electric typewriter. It was huge and had a paper ribbon, which could only be used once. If it broke, we had to reassemble it somehow. We loathed this electric typewriter and hardly ever used it, except when we had to write a letter to the President saying, 'Mr President ... this that and the other thing' to show him we were using his horrible electric typewriter; otherwise, it was left alone. We had to send messages by teleprinter to the American Embassy, located round the corner in Belgrave Square; telegrams could have been taken over quite easily by box, by messenger. No, we had to use the teleprinter. The teleprinter was in the passageway, enclosed in a little house, probably because of the noise. It had a key; of course you had to take the teleprinter key whenever you sent a message off or received one. Every now and then you had to get up during the night and go up and unlock it. Sometimes we had to send messages to the President, via the American Embassy, in the middle of the night. They were addressed from the Prime Minister to the President, but always headed "From Former Naval Person (that was Churchill, he was once Lord of the Admiralty, it was all very secret) to the President". That’s how these messages were sent, by teleprinter, and then we had a little chat with the American's at the other end.

After the battle of Stalingrad in 1943, the Prime Minister ordered a silver sword to be made, just over one meter in length, to commemorate the Russian victory there. It was called the “Stalingrad Sword” and was presented to Stalin. Before this, it was passed round the office so we could all have a look at it. We, of course, had no idea what was going on at this battle, one didn’t think about the people suffering, it was just war and you hoped we would win. One didn’t really think about what it meant. I only realised later on how awful it was, saw the other side of the picture.

Travelling up to London on the train after 48 hours off duty, there were sometimes air raid alarms, sometimes the train stopped, sometimes it didn't. I didn't get up till late on the day I was off, the day after I had to set off again at 10 o'clock in the morning, or whenever the train went. From Grange Road to Three Bridges, from Three Bridges up to Victoria, then on the bus, to get to the office by half past one. We weren't allowed to get there any earlier, or any later, they were very strict about the times, but if you were delayed by an air raid it wasn't so bad. Sometimes we used to go for a walks in St James' Park at the weekends. Birdcage Walk, down at the side of St James' Park, where the guards barracks were bombed. I used to meet Lizzy Sealy for lunch sometimes, Lizzy who was in the War Office, was the elder daughter of the Sealy family who owned Fonthill School. When we went for lunch we had to leave her at a certain corner because we weren't allowed to know where her office was. So we said, "good-bye now" and walked round the corner. We knew it was some part of the War Office, but we had no idea it was MI5, it was all very secret. She went out to Cairo before the end of the war, quite a lot of people went out to Cairo, working with the intelligence there. She became engaged to an officer of some kind and returned to England. Then the engagement was broken off, so that didn't come to anything. She continued working for MI5 and the War Office until she retired. She later married an architect and lived in the cottage at Fonthill. The big school was sold and turned into a block of flats. Lizzy's just the same as usual, she doesn't write letters; she rings me up every now and again. I've been over to see her when I was home on holiday, visiting Richard. He took me down there. Richard, after leaving Fonthill, went to Ardingly, a big public school in Sussex. He joined the Royal Engineers and went out to India with them. That's where he spent his part of the war. He had an accident climbing over a wall, got his leg smashed up during exercises of some kind. He didn't see any actual fighting with the Engineers in Northern India, but did learn Urdu and Hindi. He liked India and stayed on after the war working in import, export with some firm. He was in India when I married in 1950; so he wasn't in England for the wedding.

Sometimes I went down and stayed with Pat Sealy and her grandmother at their house in Bantham on the Devon coast. That's where I was taught to row. I loved rowing. We rowed out to sea and caught fish with a spinner, mackerel I think they were. Pat disappeared during the war, she joined the WRNS, then she just disappeared. Everybody thinks she committed suicide, threw herself into the sea. She was never seen again. She left to go back on duty, wherever she was stationed, but never arrived at her duty station, never turned up, nobody knows what happened to her. I think she suffered from some kind of depression and they think very likely she committed suicide and probably drowned. It was very sad; she was such a nice person, Pat.  One had three weeks holidays from Number 10 a year during the war. I enjoyed going on bicycle tours with Frances. Frances Allan went to school with me in Horley and then completed her training as a handicrafts schoolmistress. I'm sure she wasn't called up – school had to continue, so they needed teachers. We went on a bicycle tour together when there were no signposts – in case the Germans landed – and still some concrete teeth in the middle of the road to stop German tanks during the invasion scare of 1940. We had to read our way by maps, one wasn’t supposed to ask any questions as to where you were, in case you were a German spy asking the way. We had good lessons in map reading, and cycled right round Devon and Cornwall.

I was at 10 Downing Street from the beginning of 1942 till the spring of '45. A memorandum had been circulating: ‘anybody wishing to join the British Element of the Austrian Commission, going to be set up at the end of the war?’ Everybody knew we were going to win the war, and everything was being organised beforehand for the Commissions for Germany and Austria. I thought it would be a cheap way of seeing Austria, so I put my name down for that. We were only temporary civil servants, which meant we would loose our jobs at the end of the war. There wouldn't be this enormous Prime Minister's office any longer; it would all go back to normal. One of the men in the Cabinet Offices, Rex Foy, had also put his name down to join the Commission as Head of the Trade and Supply Branch of the Economic Division. He was looking for a secretary, so I had an interview with him and he said, yes that would be fine, I could be his secretary when we went to Austria. I joined the Commission and left 10 Downing Street at the end of March, before the war had ended. The Commission had already been established in Rome in preparation for the move up to Austria.

As a farewell present I was given silver topped oval glass trinket box engraved “10 Downing Street, 1942 – 1945”. One had them on one’s dressing table in those days and it was the done thing to give silver leaving presents. After leaving Downing Street, I officially joined the Commission. One had to be inoculated, medically examined, visit this organisation in Cromwell Road and be looked at and have one’s papers prepared. It all took time. You couldn't just start off from one second to the next. We were issued with uniforms and bedding – blankets and sheets. Therefore I was no longer at 10 Downing Street when the war actually ended on the 8 May, which was a pity, as that would have been a great occasion. I received my “Movement Order” and my father accompanied me by train to Liverpool where I left on a troop ship from Liverpool docks on 10 May 1945. I was 24. The troop ship was blacked-out in case there were any submarines still lurking about that might have torpedoed us. Of course there weren't any, but the troop ship was blacked out anyway. On board there were officers and girls who were joining the Austrian Commission, mostly military with some civilians.

[1] Mrs Churchill was the head of the “Aid to the Russians Fund” as was Mrs Roosevelt, run by the Red Cross.

[2] Miss Hamblin and Shiela Minto (when she retired) were appointed as Wardens of “Chartwell”, Churchill’s private house in Kent, now a museum.

[3] John Peck – later Ambassador to Ireland

Kommentar schreiben

24 February 2003

I work at this text all morning, the sun streams into the lounge, but I sit in our little office cum guest room cum storage space. This room is always slightly gloomy, yet I spend the best part of my day here. I sometimes miss my former office spaces, the light open plan office at my last “real” job. But I am happier now, more relaxed, pursuing my own goals. I wonder when I will have moved all these words enough, enough to like their shape, rhythm and structure. An endless loop of reading and re-reading. I aim to have it finished by my marriage date. A successful conclusion to my non-marital status. Friends can read it while we are on our honeymoon, though we don’t know where we’re going yet. The minute we decide on something we receive the answer: fully booked. I wonder what the feedback will be? I’ve always been diligent – I used to win prizes for it at school! – but this really is a test of perseverance. The story is fascinating, the events are pure history, but are the words good enough for it?

I visit June this afternoon, she has a slight sniffle. We talk of her cat, Rani. June tells of how she can’t jump on the windowsill any longer, has to convince herself of her leap from the kitchen table. Both aging genteelly together.

More photos. Lichtenstein, Vaduz. How she and Lucie traveled there from Zuers not knowing you needed a health certificate to enter the country. Being held up at the boarder station, a doctor called to examine them. It seems Lichtenstein was very wary of possible diseases from Austria. How the kind doctor gave them a lift into town after proclaiming them healthy. The shops there were so luxurious in contrast to Vienna, June bought a handbag.

1947 and the snow in Vienna, up to her waist, June helps clear a footpath in front of the office. Snow such as I’ve never seen in my six years here, I remember ankle deep snow, but certainly not waist high. I wonder if there will ever be such snow again.

Relaxed pictures of June and her mother on holiday in Locarno, June 1947. They met in Zurich, travelled there together and also went on a bus trip. “Daddy stayed at home in his garden, he wouldn’t go anywhere”. Even later, when Mummy needs a walking stick there are still pictures of her away from home, visiting June, catching up on her daughter’s news. An intrepid lady, used to travelling. Mother and daughter, arms interlinked.

Pictures of Prague just before it became communist, Whitsun 1948. The contrast to Vienna, in Prague you could eat well, everything was available; there was no food in Vienna. “Max always said there were lots of pretty girls in Prague, and it was quite true, the girls were very pretty, but the men…”

I remember Dr. Czedik-Eysenberg, someone I’d like to call a friend though I only met him twice. He acted as a consultant to a previous employer. I gave him a lift back to Vienna one afternoon. A knowledgeable, fascinating elderly man with a busy life. Unfortunately he passed away not long after. He told me while he was growing up after the war he once saw two British soldiers standing by a lake with fishing rods. As they didn’t look particularly threatening he went up to them to find out what they were doing. “We’re fishing”. Until now he’d only seen the Russian soldiers “fishing” by throwing a bomb into a lake and skimming the dead fish off the top. The English men asked him if he could direct them to somewhere they could obtain hot water for a cup of tea. As they were actually fishing and friendly he decided to do so, assuring the Gasthaus owner they were quite safe. Fascinating stories disappearing with time….

Kommentar schreiben

Now I'm going to tell you about the trip to Naples on the troop ship. I shared a cabin with two girls, two Betty's. They were typists from an office in Cardiff; the girl who worked with me was Betty Shreeve. The weather became warmer and warmer as we sailed closer to Gibraltar and we would sit up on deck to enjoy the sun. We were given Italian lessons to prepare us for our time in Rome. Nothing much happened on board, except sitting around, cinema shows and Italian lessons. Yes, we had a cinema there – there had to be some form of amusement for the troops. The journey took approximately ten days; we left on May 10, and arrived in Naples a fortnight later, where we disembarked. We were all loaded onto army lorries called "TCVs” - Troop Carrying Vehicles, big lorries where you had to climb up at the back. They had seats along the sides and down the middle, with a canvas top. We were sent off to Rome, by road. We passed the ruins of the monastery of Monte Cassino, which had been destroyed in the battle of the same name in 1944. The Germans were on the top of the mountain in the monastery and the British and the American troops had overcome their resistance. It was terrible to see the ruins and what had happened there. On the way, we stopped for something to eat at an army camp. That's the first time I ever saw a latrine. It was quite open – there was a back to it, but no sides and no front, so we girls sat down next to each other all in a row, ten of us, all next to each other – quite an experience!

We eventually made it to Rome and were deposited in various hotels according to our rank. I was a very junior sub-lieutenant, thus officer rank, because of my job as PA (personal assistant) to Rex Foy, the future Head of the Trade and Supply Branch of the Economic Division of the British Element of the Allied Commission for Austria. Rex had the same rank as a Four Star General and was very proud of it, although he was a civilian – all civilians were given equivalent army ranks. The typists and others below the personal assistants went to a different hotel, they were non-officer status. I was the lowest of the officer ranks, and we were housed in the Hotel D'Zaglio. During the day we worked in an Air Ministry building, it was terribly hot and there was no air conditioning. The army doctor gave us salt tablets because we felt so faint and weak the whole time. I didn't like Rome at all; it was too, too hot. Some people loved it, they visited the museums and the churches, the Coliseum, but I didn't appreciate that so much. We had some bathing; we went down to Ostia, a bathing place by the sea with black sand, not far out of Rome. That was nice. We dined in restaurants up in the Pincio Gardens, with a view over the city. I didn't find Rome attractive – I found it very depressing. I didn't want to see the museums; I'd been there in 1938 on the trip to Capri and seen some of the sights then. Anyhow, we were working all day long – we worked from 9 till 4 o'clock in the afternoon, until it became so hot they let us stop at two o'clock. In the hotel, run by the army, they had tin teapots, which were used indiscriminately for both coffee and tea. So you can imagine what the tea tasted like. The tea tasted of coffee and the coffee didn't taste of anything much at all. At night, two o'clock in the morning, one could hear the sheep being driven through the streets to the slaughterhouse, you could hear them bleating. The trampling of the feet going past. Other than that there was only army traffic on the streets. The people were nicely dressed, they were all very cheerful and well off in Rome, certainly not as they were in Austria. They had as much as they needed, as far as we could see anyhow.

I was working for Rex Foy. Foy was not content to stay in his office, he wanted to travel around, he didn't wish to be tied down. I was 24 and he must have been 40, married to an Irish woman, with a daughter, still living in Ireland while he went off with all the girls. He was well known for it, though I had no idea of this at the beginning. The only way I could get rid of him was to laugh at him; he didn't like that, so he left me alone. Later he had a girlfriend in Vienna who became pregnant. She was sent back to England, but on discovering her pregnancy she managed to return to Vienna, with no job, no nothing – just to be with Foy. Rex Foy had a house in the Wenzgasse, and Joan lived with him there. She had three children by him – all illegitimate, because his wife refused him a divorce. He tried to register them as British subjects at the Consulate, but it wasn’t possible. As Joan was here illegally she was not eligible for any army rations; therefore, he lodged her at a Gasthaus in Spital am Semmering in Styria, in the British Zone. Rex Foy would have become Commercial Counsellor in the British Legation set up in September 1948, but he had to retire to England because of his immoral behaviour. The post was given to Colonel Daw, Head of the Industry Branch of the Economic Division.

Anyway, enough about Rex Foy's affairs, back to 1945. He didn't know what to do with Betty Shreeve and me. He thought if he had two girls working for him, he must remain in the office, but he preferred to travel all over the place – for example, to see what was going on up in Austria, as we should slowly be making our way there. He decided that Betty and I should work for the Allied Military Government, in Bozen, Bolzano, in South Tyrol. I had never heard of Bozen up in the Dolomites. We set off – Betty and I, with an interpreter and two other officers also going to work there. We boarded a small Italian plane, it might have been a bomber or fighter. There were cracks in the floor, one could look down at one’s feet and see the clouds beneath one. There were no seats, so we had to sit on our luggage. The pilot asked, "would anybody like to look out from the cockpit?" It was open; you could walk through to the cockpit where the pilot was flying his plane, which had a glass shield over it. I said, “yes, I'm very interested”. I went up, stood behind him, and then wanted to look over the side to see what was below. The sides were open; the screen was just in front of the pilot, over his head and in front of him. I started to lean over the side when he yanked me back again, "Oh you mustn't do that! Otherwise the slipstream will pull you out of the plane. You can only stand here if you stand up straight, then the slip stream goes over your head." So I stood up straight behind the pilot and looked out as much as I could. That was my first adventure in an aeroplane.

The plane couldn’t take us very far and we had to land at Bologna for petrol, at some military airfield. Then we flew on to Bozen. Outside of Bozen the Americans had a landing ground. The pilot told us to put the entire luggage to the back of the plane and sit on top of it to weigh down the plane’s tail while we are landing; otherwise, we might crash. He eventually landed safely and we disembarked. However, there was nobody there to meet us, no Americans, nobody. Eventually the Americans turned up in a jeep and took us into Bozen. We were deposited at the Hotel Central – a military transit hotel, where various officers would stay on their way to somewhere else, and we girls had our billets there. Betty Shreeve and I shared a room.

Our office was a little way out of the town in a school, part of which was not in use having been requisitioned. In Bozen I worked for Colonel Carver, a very nice man, later the assistant director of the Economic Division, Allied Commission for Austria, British Element, as Rex Foy was travelling. There were three British officers, Betty and I, and the interpreter. We were the Economic Division, trying to find out what the Italians and the Germans had been doing, the kind of factories they had run. Some German army troops were still prisoners of war, but a number were soon released. A German General, an Austrian, used to come in for questioning as to where stocks of army material were. There were many trains filled with captured goods; a great deal of German material was still in Bozen. It was from there that I obtained my Olivetti typewriter. If one procured anything from this it wasn’t called “stealing”, but “liberating”. So I liberated, or it was liberated for me, an Olivetti typewriter later sent on to Vienna for me. British typewriters for office work were sent out by the War Office; I still have a wartime Imperial typewriter here.

There was an officer working with us in the military government in Bozen who was very interested in filmmaking. He discovered the famous film actor, Louis Trenker, also lived in Bozen. Louis Trenker made mountaineering films with Leni Riefenstahl, a very famous German filmmaker. He had acted in many of her films about the Dolomites. This officer contacted Louis Trenker and went to visit him. Now I was very keen on having a dirndl, though of course there was nothing in the shops, no material, nothing much to be bought. A few souvenirs, but not even many of those. However, with the help of this officer and Louis Trenker I was able to obtain a length of material in order to have a dirndl made. It was a length of taffeta material, with small squares: green, gold and red. It was very attractive. I had the dirndl made in Bozen. It closed at the throat with a little white frill, had wooden flower buttons and a green apron. What’s happened to it now I don’t know, it disappeared a long time ago. I was very proud to posses a taffeta dirndl, a special occasion dirndl.

It was lovely there, the food was good, we went walking at the weekends, up into the Dolomites. I was quite fascinated by the mountains, they was gorgeous. One of our excursions was up a mountain with a Drahtseilbahn. We were waiting to go up as it was coming down from the plateau up above, and who should step out of the cabin, but General Alexander with all his staff. General Alexander was in charge of the British troops in Italy at this time and had been in North Africa in the Eighth Army. It was a great thrill, to see General Alexander at such close quarters. We even went to a ball, a Partisan’s Ball in Meran, where the Partisans all wore red scarves round their necks. It was an excitement to see Tito's Partisans at close quarters. They looked just like ordinary Italians, like ordinary soldiers. Quite "fesch" they were, quite dashing! We also rode on Mussolini’s train – all the captured enemy transport was in Bozen including Mussolini’s train and one of his large limousines. Another adventure was our trip up the Sarntheim Valley, a lovely valley with a river running through it. There were about three of us, and we had dinner at a little Gasthaus where they were having some kind of dance, probably some kind of Volksfest. I was asked to dance by the village idiot. Of course I had no idea, I stood up and danced round with this funny man, everybody was laughing and clapping! One evening when we were there, the partisans probably, though I don’t know for sure, punctured all the army vehicle’s tires, so they were all flat when we wanted to go home. As we couldn't drive through the night with flat tires we found a hayloft at the back of the Gasthaus and spent the night in the tickly hay. In the morning the tires were mended and we drove back to the office. We didn't have any other adventures except sitting in the sun and picnics at the weekends. St Ulrich is a beautiful village not far from Bozen famous for its wood carvers, wooden religious figures and dishes all carved by hand. I've still got the beautiful carved pear-wood fruit bowl I purchased there; I saw it being made. I gave to my mother and now I've got it again. These days it’s mostly done by machinery, very little by hand, for the many tourists who visit the region.

We were in Bozen for almost two months, June and July 1945. We were then ordered to return to Rome as the Military Government had almost finished its work there. So we returned to Rome, which wasn't very pleasant. My boss wasn't there, he was still travelling around, so it was decided that I should be sent up to Austria to work with the Military Government in Bruck an der Mur. We flew up to Klagenfurt with an RAF plane and arrived in Bruck an der Mur on the TCV. The Military Government staff was quartered in the Hotel Bauer, and the Head Quarters in the Felten und Guilleaume works (makers of wire ropes) just near the station. The Station Hotel was for the senior military officers; however, as we were military officers, but also civilians, we were in the Hotel Bauer. We were there for some time. In this region there were many steel and iron works situated in the valleys. It all looked rather romantic, for all that it was an industrial area, especially when compared to similar areas in England.

Rex Foy eventually decided it was time he settled himself in Vienna, so mid-September 1945 I was called up to Vienna, Betty already having been sent there earlier. Graz and Klagenfurt were the centres of the British operations in Styria and Carinthia, the two British military zones. Lower Austria and Burgenland were in the Russian zone, Upper Austria and Salzburg the Americans’, and the French were down in the west, in Tyrol and Vorarlberg. I was in Styria (Bruck an der Mur) for about three to four weeks in August, after which I was taken to Vienna, as my boss requested. I remember driving over the Semmering and the first sight of the Russians at the demarcation line at the Semmering Border. First we passed the British in their house, then the Russians in their dilapidated house. Then all the autumn crocuses, I'd never seen autumn crocuses before, it was beautiful. We entered Vienna via the Altmansdorferstrasse. On the right hand side there was a Gasthaus where the British were stationed, and then we were entering the British area of Vienna.

Kommentar schreiben

12 March 2003

Last night Michael and I decided we will not, at present, try to buy my grandmother’s house and move to Switzerland. It’s too emotionally complicated, the group of inheritors ask for more money than we can scratch together. We decide to pursue our independent path, unbeholden to anyone wherever possible. It’s a hard decision. It means I finally have to say a total good-bye to my dearly beloved grandmother. I won’t be able to keep her memory alive by living in her home. I told so many people we are probably moving to Switzerland it’s funny to suddenly tell them we are staying in Vienna for now. Unless some unforeseen fairy blesses us. But we are very happy here, have many supportive, kind friends and a lovely flat. Vienna is still one of the most beautiful cities I have ever seen. The last few months I have been stepping out, thinking, ‘I won’t be here another winter, I won’t see Vienna like this again’ and trying to acclimatise myself to leaving. Today I go out and think, ‘thank goodness we are staying in this beautiful city. A city which is developing rapidly, an exciting cultural centre!’ It is also a good feeling to be able to see things through, building on everything achieved here so far. I will be able to keep visiting June and hopefully bring her this book in person one day.

We discussed my indecision, swinging between ‘move to Switzerland vs. stay in Vienna’ over our weekly tea and cake yesterday. June knows of my qualms, indecision and worries. She herself is a little depressed, recovering from a bad cold. She looks older, more frail, I try to cheer her up with amusing anecdotes from our recent weekend in Budapest. She visited Budapest twice while it was still a communist city. We speak of holidays, our still unplanned honeymoon, her holiday with Richard Thornton in 1947. Carefree days driving around Austria’s lakes in a car especially ordered from England together with his great smiling Russian wolfhound. Visiting the ruins of Hitler’s village, his house. Walking up the Gross Glockner, crossing the glacier with ice picks and a bit of wood for heating the hut at the top. Then later saying goodbye to Polish friends when sending the Borodin’s off to America with false papers to pass the Russians, bringing them down to Bruck an der Mur and waving good-bye to the smiling couple. Goodbye to Vienna for them, goodbye to a dream for me. Another dream has come to the fore.

Kommentar schreiben

3 April 2018
Its quite funny reading this again...now living in my grandmother's house in Switzerland! After our wedding in 2003 Michael found a job in Zurich and so he moved to Switzerland first - moving in with his mother again to save money. Then, 4 months pregnant, I packed up our Vienna flat and moved too. We moved straight into Granny's house - which had stood empty for 3 years after the last tenants moved out. It was in a very dilapidated state. There was a large hole in the kitchen floor, and of course there never had been any central heating apart from a wood burner in the lounge and a cooker with wood burning stove in addition to the electric hob. We painted the walls in organic white paint to make it all look fresh quickly - I was pregnant, I didn't want to fight with fumes! We had the floor mended and new tiles laid. When Arthur was born in September 2005 I put him to bed with a lambskin over the mattress, underneath thick covers wearing a hat. It was so cold in the bedroom! We had central heating put in in February, and I can clearly remember the first time we came home, opened the door, and it was WARM!

But  moving here proved a greater challenge than I had ever imagined. I was so homesick for Vienna, I would call my friend Kate who had conveniently moved by to the States to look after her mother, when breastfeeding Arthur in the middle of the night. It was the right thing to do, but hard to move from a pulsating city to a small, rural Swiss village. I didn't really know anyone, I went to the mother and baby group, but felt inadequate as my carrots weren't perfectly cut and prepared in a Tupperware. I realise that even though I am Swiss by birth my British education, my life in Vienna and London have given me a different outlook on life and work. I am too outspoken... grew up in a world where women had the vote rather earlier than my year of birth. However, after nearly 13 years as a Swiss/British person in Switzerland it does get easier. I have made some wonderful friends and I just love our home. It has improved, renovated, grown, and become more beautiful as the years go by.

Kommentar schreiben

I was driven to the Park Hotel in Hietzing. The British zones in Vienna were Hietzing in the 13^th district, the 12^th and the 3^rd district. The Headquarters of the Allied Commission for Austria, British Element, where General Winterton was quartered, was Schönbrunn Palace. The Park Hotel in Hietzing was an officers transit hotel. I stayed there for one or two nights until I was moved to a billet. We were all moved into requisitioned rooms in people’s flats, people who had obviously been Nazis and fled the city. I was allocated a room in a flat in Spohrstrasse in Hietzing, which I shared with a colleague also working in the Economic Division.  The Economic Division was situated in the Wenzgasse, in a requisitioned girl's school and one of the largest divisions of the British Element. Other divisions were the Political Division, the Information Section, Intelligence, Internal Affairs, Press, and various other sections, all in requisitioned premises in Hietzing. The American's had their Headquarters in town in the Hotel Bristol, the Russians were in the Hotel Imperial and we had the Hotel Sacher – also an Officers’ Transit Hotel. Up till now we had worn civilian clothes, but in Vienna we had to wear our uniforms. We were issued with summer uniforms in Rome, but we never wore them, as there were no Russians there. The Russians were said to be dangerous, they raped all the girls. It was warm enough in September, when we arrived in Vienna, to wear the uniform – khaki skirts and khaki aertex blouses designed for the heat in Rome – as protection until the temperature dropped. Of course the weather turned very cold in Vienna in winter and they were extremely slow with providing any kind of winter uniform, but we received them in the end. Till then we borrowed jackets and things from army officer friends. We were also issued with sheets and blankets as we were living in billets, and storm lanterns for occasions when the electricity went off, which it frequently did.

I also worked in Hietzing and shared an office on the first floor of the school in the Wenzgasse with my boss, Rex Foy. In October he decided we must go to Berlin to try and obtain fuel for Austria. There was very little fuel in Austria and a great amount of coal in the British Zones in Germany. In Vienna there was always this smell of brown coal everywhere, people had nothing to heat their stoves, they had to go out into the woods or collect branches in the Lainzer Tiergarten where the walls were all broken down. There was even a crashed American plane still lying in the park there, I remember seeing it for a couple of years till they moved it away. To ‘do a swan’ was an Eighth Army expression meaning you were on an unauthorised trip somewhere, but we were on official business. Consequently we went off on this great trip to Berlin in October to procure a certain quantity of coal fuel from the German Allied Commission with whom we had to keep statistics of how many wagons of coal were coming to Austria daily. We set off in a convoy of three army vehicles: my boss, Rex Foy and various officers. Rex Foy and I were the only civilians in this convoy. We travelled via Salzburg (the American zone), to the border between Austria and Germany, at Hof, north of Salzburg. There we had to pass the Russian checkpoint, as we were entering the Russian zone in Germany. There were the Russians and there were we in this forest at the boarder and they said, "no you haven't got the right papers, go away" and wouldn’t let us continue. My boss wasn't giving up so easily, “I’m a Four Star General!” However they wouldn't believe him as he was in civilian clothes. We had to return to Hof. We were there for about three hours, waiting to get permission and eventually passed the border into the Russian zone. We drove through Leipzig where we stopped for something to eat, I can only remember it was very dark. We traveled on, but then we lost our way – in the middle of the Russian zone! We had to find the bridge to cross the River Elbe, it was dark and late at night and we had no idea where we were. “We'll have to stay the night in the three cars”, so they were parked on the riverside. It was no good driving around in the Russian zone; one never knew what might happen. We just stayed put, then, in the morning light we saw the bridge about half a mile from where we were stationed! We could have crossed the bridge had we found it.

We eventually arrived in Berlin, travelling through the demolished towns in what later became East Germany. Heaps and piles of rubble everywhere. It was terrible to see the destruction and the bombing. There was nothing. No houses left, just heaps of rubble. Berlin was hardly better. The Viennese always complained how much they had suffered during the war, but there was very little bombing until 1942 and in my opinion they suffered very little in comparison to Germany. They were mostly upset by the bomb damaged Opera, the Burg Theater and also about the damage to St. Stephan’s Cathedral, which had lost its roof through fire. It was nothing compared to Germany. In Berlin we stayed at the Hotel Adlon, now a British and American military Officers’ Transit Hotel. We were in Berlin in October 1945. It was very cold. My boss, Rex Foy, went to have dealings with the German Commission. The Allied Commission for Germany was the equivalent of the Allied Commission in Austria. He managed to fulfil his mission of obtaining a large quota of coal for Austria. Our convoy then drove away again, out through Bad Oyenhausen, the frontier post between the British and the Russian zones, all through the Russian zone. I remember seeing Russian lorries – they had chimneys with smoke coming out of their tops and were not fuelled with petrol. We drove down to the Ruhr, for more coal for the Austrians. We had to interview the Americans regarding the economic situation and stayed in the Krupp Villa in Essen, requisitioned by the Americans, now an army transit hotel. The Krupp’s were one of the two great industrial families in the Ruhr area. We spent the night in great state in the Krupp Villa – it had a big, grand staircase, otherwise we didn't see very much. There was furniture; you just took it for granted. That is that and there is there, we didn't really consider where it might be from or what it was like. Essen was also very badly bombed.

Instead of going straight back to Vienna, which we could have done (my boss didn't want to go back to the office just yet), we continued down to Tyrol. "Ah, there's a factory in Feldkirch we could go and look at" – we were supposed to be inspecting all the factories to see what they were producing. Of our convoy of three army vehicles one was a "biscuit box", so-called because of it’s square appearance, rather like a biscuit box, with a roof that opened. One could stand up straight and the air would pass over you if you didn't lean to the side. Driving through the Black Forest, down to Feldkirch, the autumn colouring was very beautiful. From Feldkirch we drove on to St Anton, where the French were in command and stayed in the Post Hotel, the largest and most beautiful hotel in St Anton. I purchased my first pair of skis there from the French. They had skis, everything all requisitioned from the Austrians – it was all “liberated”! Old fashioned wooden skis with a binding over the front of the boots. Later, I had ski boots made for me especially by a shoemaker in the Mariahilferstrasse – a very famous mountaineering boot and ski boot maker in Vienna.

We eventually returned to Vienna. However, my boss was still keen on travelling around, so we attended a conference on railways in Rome. l nearly missed the plane in Udine where we stopped to re-fuel. They said, “oh we'll have a two hours wait”, so I went for a walk and of course I came back too late. They were all waiting to leave for Rome and there was me strolling up keeping everybody waiting. During this journey we were given vodka to drink by the Russians, our travelling companions along with some Americans, French, British and Austrians. We also visited Venice for a conference and stayed at the Hotel Danielli, the best and most luxurious hotel in Venice. It cost one and sixpence a day in those days for the Army! I've stayed in the Danielli twice. I even flew to London with Rex Foy for economic discussions at the Commission Headquarters in Norfolk House. We were there for about a week. On the return journey we had to land at Frankfurt Airport as there was too much snow in Vienna to land. There was nothing much left of Frankfurt Airport, then managed by the Americans. I went for a little walk and found a village shop selling postcards. One couldn’t buy anything anywhere except paper goods. Although I had no money on me, the shopkeeper kindly gave me the postcards for free.

By 1946 I’d earned home leave to England, a year after my arrival. The only way to travel home was on the military train, on the “Medloc” train route, departing at night from Aspang station, near Meidling in Vienna, now a goods station. We boarded this train and crossed the Semmering demarcation line, where the Russians came in to check the passports as usual. We arrived in Villach in the morning, the junction for the military trains coming up from Italy, bringing troops on leave or Italian wives – going back to England. We were quartered at the Villacher Hof for the night and fed on Army rations. It was a huge old-fashioned hotel with big gardens – it’s an expensive and fashionable spa resort today. There were a number of Italian wives who couldn’t speak any English accompanying their husbands who couldn’t speak any Italian! It was all very jumbled! The next day we boarded another military train, which jogged along via Salzburg and then through Germany. We had to stop for our meals wherever there was a military base where we were served in the canteen. There was no food on the train, there was a lavatory, but no kitchen. We travelled via Cologne, though we didn’t stop there, and I’ll never forget seeing the ruins of Cologne cathedral, one tower was still standing. And seeing the queues of refugees in Salzburg, they were just sitting on open wagons, some with a canvas top on them, filled with straw – the Sudetendeutschen turned out of Czechoslovakia. We finally reached Ostend, where a large military base was located, and given beds for the night, everything was very well organised. We crossed the Channel on a troop boat and finally landed in Dover. By train up to Victoria, from there the journey was more or less normal and I was home again. I had about four weeks leave and travelled back the same way. The journey took four or five days, a very roundabout way of travelling.

Back in Vienna, we had our morning and afternoon tea in the kitchens on the top floor of the Wenzgasse School, with a beautiful view over Hietzing, up to the Lainzer Tiergarten. We slept at our billets and ate in a Mess. Each Division had its own Mess – ours was in the Leopold-Müller-Gasse, about 8 minutes walk from my billet and 5 minutes from our offices. There was a Mess Sergeant (Ryan) and an Austrian cook and other servants. At first the mess was in the Hietzinger Hauptstrasse, in a little Gasthaus on the corner, where we were very badly fed. Half the food went on the black market instead of to us I'm quite sure. We were so hungry we used to eat sugar on slices of bread and butter to fill the gaps. It was not very pleasant for the first month or so. Finally they decided this place was no good and requisitioned a house in the Leopold-Müller-Gasse, just off the Hügelpark, where Stephanie (my daughter) later went to Kindergarten. Little did I think when I was working in the Wenzgasse I would still be in Vienna when I had a child and she would go to school here. It was quite extraordinary. I had signed on for a year and thought I would return to England at the end of it. Then I became used to life in Vienna, thought, ‘well it’s not so bad, I'll stay on a bit longer’. In the end I was here till 1948, the year the Commission was closing down and when I joined the British Legation then just opening up.

Nobody lived in the requisitioned house serving as our mess in the Leopold-Müller-Gasse except the Mess Sergeant and his girlfriend. There was an untidy garden at the back with a big rubbish dump. Obviously the British Army moved in and threw out everything they didn’t want. I was looking round this one day and found a small black pot. I took it home and cleaned it up and used it as a coffee pot. One day, after Max had died, I went to an antique fair in the Hofburg and at one of the stands I saw a whole row of coffee pots just like mine, in all sizes. I asked how much one of a similar size to mine would cost and he said 10,000 Shillings! It was a Jugendstil silver coffee pot. I had no idea what Jugendstil was when I came to Austria. What a shock it was to see a whole line of coffee pots just like mine made by this famous Viennese silversmith!

Let me tell you a little about life in the Wenzgasse. We had to walk down from the Spohrstrasse for breakfast in the Mess at 8 o'clock, then onto the Wenzgasse. Lunch and dinner was also eaten at the Leapold-Müller-Gasse and after our evening meal we could do as we pleased. We could go to the British Army cinema in what is now called Ekrzent. English films were shown there, the Third Man was first played there after its premiere in London. At the weekends we went walking up in the woods. We walked into the Russian zone, where we shouldn't have been and had all kinds of adventures there. No, nothing terrible happened, when we saw a Russian we looked the other way and spoke German to each other. We were not allowed into the Russian zone, it was strictly forbidden. I was in the Wenzgasse till 1947 when the school was returned to the Austrians and our offices were transferred to the Schönbrunn Barracks, the British Army Head Quarters, now the Maria Theresien Kaserne, at the top of the Maxing Strasse. What else happened in Vienna?

In 1946, ‘47 various conferences took place. The Russians, the French, the British and the Americans met at the Allied Secretariat every week. The Allied Secretariat was located on the Schwarzenbergplatz, at the time renamed Stalinplatz by the Russians, in the Haus der Industrie. The Economic Division met there, along with various other divisions and all their equivalent partners for these weekly conferences. There were problems at the beginning, because the Russians kept a different time, the Austrians, invited to listen in at some of these meetings, had a different time and the British had a different time. The times didn't coincide, so the meetings were late in starting until a common time was agreed on. I had to go down there once or twice to take notes for Tim Hansen who was representing the British. I have a photo of myself sitting there at the long table with the other delegates and opposite a Russian interpreter, an interpretess, writing away hard. We had to take everything down by shorthand and type it up later on for the Minutes.

We didn't have much contact with the Austrians. At first we weren't allowed to fraternise, meaning one wasn’t allowed to have anything to do with them. But after a while one began to know people. I had and still have some good friends here. I didn't feel lonely; I had lots of friends in the office as well as making Austrian friends. We had an Officers Club at the Palace Kinsky, where we could have dinner and dance. It was a beautiful palace, complete with a little oval ballroom and minstrel’s gallery, though very dilapidated in those days. There was also a nightclub called "The Bag of Nails", but I never went there, it wasn't quite the thing for ladies to do, to go to this nightclub. The men used to go there and invite their Austrian lady-friends. At the beginning, as they weren't supposed to fraternise with the Austrians, the Austrian girlfriends had the very undignified name of "frats" – “he's going out with his frat”. They probably took their frats to the Bag of Nails. Then there was the some consternation when wives were allowed to join their husbands. All the people in the army and the Commission were here without their wives until accommodation was found for them. The arrival of the wives was called "Operation Hen-Peck". The poor men had to do without their frats.

There were various boyfriends, but I can't go into all those details. We won't talk about the boyfriends too much I don’t think, it’s rather complicated. I'm trying to make an historical record. My first romantic experience was on a bridge over the Sarntheim River near Bozen under a full moon. John Fell was a Lieutenant Colonel, in charge of the Industry Section. We used to go on Sunday explorations up the Seiser Alm, all of us from the office. But he was married and had a child, so there was no future there. He gave me a book of poems to remember him by. John used to call the Dolomites the “foothills to heaven”. Later I was involved with a man called Dick Bridgman, but he also had a wife, so that finished when Muriel came out in “Operation Hen-Peck”. A great number of the men were married. I’m still in touch with his friend, Richard Thornton, he was one of the only unmarried man we knew. He was Roman Catholic and later married a Roman Catholic girl in Yorkshire with whom he had five children. Dick Bridgman disappeared; he immigrated to Canada after divorcing his wife as they had for a long time not agreed with each other.

Dancing at the Park Hotel – the Austrians were allowed to come to the Saturday tea dances in 1945. So the Austrians were mixing with the British army, but that didn't last for very long. The Austrian's danced in a peculiar manner. In England ballroom dancing is smooth, whereas the Austrians jigged up and down when they danced. They had a completely different method of movement, except for the Viennese waltz of course, that was something else. That I used to love. I had some Polish friends in Hietzing, living in the Trauttmansdorfgasse. Carol and Anna Borodin, I think he was some relative of the composer. A lovely couple. They also enjoyed dancing; he was an excellent waltzer. It was a dream, waltzing with him every now and again. I used to go to their home with gin and cigarettes, anything that was dealt with on the black market, or anything that could be bartered. At the beginning we had Shillings, but then British Army Forces Special Vouchers, BAFSV (pronounced ‘bafs’), were issued to try and put a stop to the black market. These were used at the army gift shops and the NAAFI. The NAAFI was the equivalent of the American PX, where one could buy spirits, cigarettes, chocolate and suchlike. It was called the ‘Navy, Army and Air Force Institute’ and it provided shops for the Forces. If we wanted to buy anything on the Austrian market we had to use Shillings. We were paid in Pounds and if one changed one’s money at the Army bank one received 40 Shillings to the Pound, practically nothing in those days. The sale of a bottle of gin could make you 200 Shillings, and a bottle of gin was very cheap for us, so it was worth it if you wanted Shillings for dressmakers etc., and you didn’t have to change your Pounds at this ridiculous rate. We sold our allowance of spirits, cigarettes, tea and coffee to friends or people you got to know. But you had to be careful with whom you were dealing as it was forbidden. This method of black-marketing was known by us colloquially as “flogging”.

First I shared a flat with a girl with whom I didn’t get on with at all. She used to have parties in her big room and I, in the small room, wouldn’t be invited. She didn’t want me there, she wanted somebody else living with her. The landlady, whose husband owned the flat, was quite young with a small baby. When her husband returned after being a prisoner of war, he accused the British of inventing the concentration camps, which was quite true, during the Boer War in South Africa. We always heard that from various people. After a couple of months I moved to another billet and I shared two rooms in a requisitioned flat with Lucie Lambert, later Matron of Honour at my wedding. There was a bedroom, a sitting room, and a kitchen, which we shared with the owners. The bathroom had a chip heater; one had to heat up the water with either coal or wood if one wanted to have a bath. We didn't have a bath very often; it was a great to-do to heat up water. If you knew anybody who had a proper heating system anywhere with a bath, we said, “may we come and have a bath in your flat please?” Our washing was rather sketchy. We could boil water on the stove when the gas was on, but the gas went off very often, so it was also very difficult to bake a cake. Towards the end of the occupation, in 1948, Lucie was transferred from Vienna down to Headquarters in Klagenfurt after which she returned to England. I stayed in the flat on my own after that, two rooms, quite big enough for me. Then Barbara, the wife of the owner, returned. She worked for the German’s in Italy during the war and afterwards as a translator for the Americans; she spoke excellent English. When that folded she came back to Vienna. Barbara was very Prussian and could fly a plane; she had a pilot’s licence. She was also very blond, sexy and voluptuous and could make up to the men. At first we didn’t get on at all, she tried to dictate to me and I wouldn’t be dictated to. When my aunt in England gave me a set of silver brushes with my initials engraved on them she accused me of stealing them from her mother-in-law, but I showed her my initials. The Austrians were always very suspicious of us living in their houses. However, after that we became good friends. We used to do our Christmas baking together, she taught me how to bake Lebkuchen.

I was always very keen on making a Christmas cake every year. The very first one I made, was in the Spohrstrasse when I was billeted with the Wendlings. In 1946 to ‘47 the gas was still very erratic, one couldn't rely on it on being on for any length of time. It was suddenly turned off and then it would come on again two or three hours later. I thought, “I can't bake the cake at home, because Christmas cake needs an even temperature for about four to five hours baking”. Then I remembered the Konditorei Gerstner in the Kärntner Strasse, which had just started up again and so I asked them if they would bake a cake for me in their oven. They said, “yes, certainly”, so I bought the ingredients from the NAAFI. I arranged for the office car to pick me up at 7.30 in the morning, I mixed the cake the previous night, put it in its tin, the driver drove me down to Gerstner and I presented them with the cake. "Now this cake needs four hours baking at a certain temperature in Fahrenheit." You could regulate the temperature on gas stoves in England, even before the war, here they hadn't heard of such a thing. Gerstner said to me, very sternly, "madam, you needn't tell us about the temperature, we know what kind of heat this cake needs, and we can tell by putting our hand into the oven, what the temperature is". They were all coke stoves, coke ovens in those days. "That's very kind, thank you very much, I'll come and collect it in two days time. Would you put a white icing on it?" I wanted white icing because English Christmas cake is always iced in white. Anyway, when I went to pick it up I didn't recognise the cake, it was beautifully decorated in a chocolate icing, which doesn't go with an English Christmas cake at all, but it looked very nice. That was my very first Christmas cake, made with the help of Konditorei Gerstner. Since then I've always tried to make a Christmas cake every year. It should have marzipan icing round the top and the bottom, then its decorated nicely with white Royal icing. This has always been one of the things I enjoy doing, and still manage to do, though it’s not as beautifully decorated as it used to be, it’s good enough with lots of silver balls on it and a little marzipan Father Christmas from Heiner in the middle. It looks very Christmassy. One year I wished to have a small meringue Christmas tree made; Heiner and Demel made beautiful figures, angels and cherubs, in meringue. I asked one of them to make me a small Christmas tree to decorate my Christmas cake and I showed them the size. When I went to collect it, instead of being two inches high, it was almost eight inches high! A big meringue Christmas tree with little candles on it, it was perfect. I couldn't put it on the cake, it was too big, so I used it as a table decoration instead. Stephanie loves Christmas cake, so I try and make one when she's here. It has to be made at the beginning of November, though a friend of mine makes hers in August, then it has to be sprinkled with brandy, put away well wrapped up in aluminium foil and in an airtight tin, taken out again at the beginning of December, again sprinkled with brandy, tightly wrapped up again, then put away till a week before Christmas, when the almond paste is put on, which I used to make myself by grinding almonds. Now you can buy it in rolls, which is a great advantage. I brush the cake with honey to start off with so that the almond paste sticks to it. Then you let that dry for a few days, so it’s not too moist. Finally the icing, made of egg whites, a few drops of glycerine, lemon juice and a few drops of rosewater to decorate the cake. For the first three years the food situation in Vienna was very bad and the Allies supplied food for the population. The tins of peas, complete with worms, supplied by the Russians were not very popular! There were times when the shops were completely empty and I thought they would never be filled. Then came the time when there was plenty of everything to be had, but we were still on British Army rations and weren’t allowed to buy any food on the Austrian market.

One came to know all the houses in Hietzing, as many of them were requisitioned.  I still see these houses when I go past and think, ‘I was in that house and that house and that house’. The Head of our division, Director of the Ecomic Division, Mr Southam, lived in a big villa at the top of the Weidlichtgasse, now the residence of the American Ambassador. It had obviously belonged to a Jewish family, was taken over by the Germans, then taken over by the British, then returned to its owners after which the villa was sold to the Americans. I spent several nights there babysitting for Mr Southam, so I got to know the interior very well. It’s a beautiful house with a lovely garden and a swimming pool. I expect its been altered substantially now though. A number of the houses in Hietzing were Messes – where the Polish Embassy is now was a Mess, on the right hand side of Hietzinger Hauptstrasse, the big white painted building. The Czech Embassy was down the Maxing Strasse; it’s now the Slovak Embassy. The Park Hotel was the original Cafe Domayer where Strauss played, not the present Cafe Domayer on the corner of the Auhofstrasse. Hietzing hasn't changed very much, the only difference is all the houses have been renovated and look very spruce and elegant, one realises what beautiful houses they are. After the war they were so dingy we thought, 'oh, horrible', everything was dull and dirty and run-down. It’s no comparison; now we know what it used to look like before the war. All the beautiful Jugendstil houses in the Gloriettegasse – at first I didn’t like Jugendstil at all, I thought it very odd with all the decorations on the buildings. Some were bombed, some were rebuilt in a modern style. One house in the Gloriettegasse was bombed; it was rebuilt after the war, not very beautifully. The Schratt villa, on the corner of Gloriettegasse and Wattmanngasse, was built by Kaiser Franz Joseph for his lady-friend, Katherina Schratt (a famous actress). He used to walk across from Schönbrunn, through the Botanical Gardens out into the Maxing Strasse and to the Schratt villa to take breakfast with his lady-friend.  The Kaiser used a small door at the side of the big wooden double doors, the entrance to the Park for the Schönbrunn Zoo – incidentally the oldest existing zoo in the world. This side door was in existence till about 1990, when a completely new gate was installed. This rather spoilt the history of the Schratt Villa, which was sold once more, renovated, and now looks very smart. Another famous house on the Gloriettegasse is the Panzer Villa, built by Hoffmann, in Jugendstil, which is in all the art history books. Herr Panzer was obviously Jewish, as the Germans confiscated the property. After the war it was requisitioned by the British and used as a Senior Officer’s Mess. When it was given back to the Austrian government the Trades Union was housed there – it was a Trade Union training school for many years. The villa boasted very beautiful Jugendstil wrought-iron railings, at one time removed and replaced by a wire fence. My husband became very annoyed, he wrote a letter to the head of the Trades Union, Herr Benya. He received an answer, saying the railings would be replaced, but they were away for about five years. However, they were returned in the end, so they weren't sold for the benefit of the Trades Union. What a relief!

The Franz Schalk Platz in Hietzing reaches up into the woods where an air raid shelter was located. When I first arrived here you could walk down into it, but that's all been blocked up now. There was the anti-aircraft site with anti-aircraft guns at the top of the Küniglberg, and anti-aircraft barracks. In the early days one could walk all over this anti-aircraft gun emplacement, one could go down into the cellars, crawl around the whole thing. Now its all been covered up and belongs to the ORF, the huge television centre was erected on the site of the old anti-aircraft barracks. The Schrebergaerten opposite were built during the war for people to grow vegetables using the earth turned out when building these barracks. I acquired my Schrebergarten, more or less the equivalent of an English allotment garden, there in 1960.

I must tell you about the little theatre in Schönbrunn. Schönbrunn, the Imperial Palace, was the headquarters of the British Element of the Allied Commission. The Commissioner was located there and the political division, as I've mentioned before. There was also an entertainment's section to keep the troops happy with concerts, but the only place for a concert was the beautiful little baroque theatre in Schönbrunn, built by Marie Theresa. It had no heating in it, so the Royal Engineers put in new heating, it was all restored and brought up to date and we had concerts there. It was really a lovely theatre. Nobody knows that the British engineers put in the heating, so I must tell people. The Gloriette monument at the top of the hill in the Palace gardens was partially destroyed by an American bomb. The American's dropped their bombs indiscriminately as they were leaving, they dropped any old bomb anywhere and one of these bombs half destroyed the left-hand side of the Gloriette monument. This was also restored by the British engineers – nobody knows that any longer either. We did something for Schönbrunn anyhow. We also had horses in the palace stables and a riding club. The Austrians didn't approve, they became very furious when they saw us riding through the park. I tried to learn, but I wasn't very good on a horse. Stephanie, my daughter, she loves riding. An interesting event in the Commission was the Military Tattoo organised by the British and the French. This was a military display with riding, troop formations and bands playing. A military Tattoo is an English tradition; one took place at Aldershot every year, when the army demonstrates its talents with all kinds of exhibitions. The one in Vienna was held at the back of Schönbrunn Palace, reaching as far as the Neptune Fountain. There were no flowerbeds there then; there was nothing, just grass. Everything had been dug up during the war to plant vegetables. I still remember the French Calvary officers and the equestrian display they gave.

 When the Palace was given back in ’47, the Head of the Commission moved up to Schönbrunn Barraks, now the Maria Theresien Kaserne, at the top of the hill, the former SS barracks, built by the Germans during the war. They are still very good barracks. The Commission was centred in there, and the army remained there until the Treaty was signed in 1955, when all the troops left. The British, Americans, Russians and French all had to leave by the end of October. A friend of mine, Freddie Lowe, who worked at 10 Downing Street with me during the war, later joined the Foreign Office and came out quite often with a Foreign Office delegation for the Treaty discussions, which went on for five years. She travelled out with Mr Anthony Eden and his staff, and was also in the Foreign Office delegation, which negotiated with the Russians. The Russians were the main problem to all these negotiations, they were always saying “no” to everything. It was lovely seeing Freddie again, one of my Number 10 friends. She borrowed the Foreign Office car on one occasion and we were driven to the Wachau. We picked apricots and went swimming in the Danube, I have a beautiful photograph of me swimming there. The water was quite warm; we didn't go out very far, just in a little bay somewhere. It must have been before I married, as I was still in the Legation then.

I don't think I've told you about the Battle of the Hietzing Bridge yet. The Argyll and Southerland Highlanders, a Scottish regiment, were stationed in Hietzing, the British zone and of course always wearing their kilts. The Russian headquarters were out in Mödling, past Hietzing, on the edge of Vienna. The Russian soldiers had to pass through Hietzing on their way back from town to their headquarters. There was a tram from Hietzing Station all the way to Mödling. Anyhow, these Russian soldiers used to come up at night, rather drunk, to catch the tram. When they saw the Scots in their kilts they laughed and made fun of them. This of course enraged the Scots, who waited for them the next day with beer bottles and thus the fight began. The Russians even brought out their guns. There was a great to-do. A British tank was brought up and this managed to calm them down, so in future the Scots kept away from the Russians. The Russian soldiers were everywhere, also still in Hietzing. There was one little enclave in the Leopold-Müller-Gasse. They still had one house in Hietzing, which they shouldn't have had and we called them Popski's Private Army. There was always a Russian on the pavement, sitting under his umbrella in the summer.

At the weekends we frequently went to the mountains by Army lorry down to the “Zone” (Styria). Once, a friend of mine, Molly Horner, and I, went off on our own from where we were staying at Mürzsteg. The Kaiser’s Hunting Lodge is there, built in an old-fashioned country style, it now belongs to the state. Ever since the end of the monarchy (1918) it has been used by the current Presidents for entertaining guests or private recreation. We thought we knew the way as we had a map. We hiked up the Veitsch, thinking we'd come back down again on the same side, back to Mürzsteg. We met some Austrian's on the slopes, and asked, "is this the right way down to Mürzsteg?" He said, "oh yes". Obviously he did it on purpose; he showed us the wrong path. We walked on and on and on, we came down in the wrong valley – on the other side of the mountain, far, far away from Mürzsteg. Our party, with the lorry transporting us, was on the other side of the mountain! We had to go to the police and ask them to try and ring the police in Mürzsteg. The police in Mürzsteg then told Walter Ingham, the trip organiser, what had happened and where we were. He was very angry. The whole group, there were about twenty of them on the other side of the mountain, had to drive all the way round, down to the main road. We had to walk as far as Mitterndorf, quite a long way, to the main road. Eventually we found each other. However, after this detour the army lorry didn't have enough petrol left for the journey back to Vienna. So we had to drive into Bruck an der Mur, further away from Vienna, to fill up at the army petrol station as there was no petrol available otherwise, then drive all the way back to Vienna. We didn't get home till about two o'clock in the morning and were certainly not very popular with the other members of the group! That was my mountaineering adventure with Molly Horner.

She and I also went on a great bicycle ride round the Wienerwald. From Hietzing to Purkersdorf, to Klein Semmering, right across to Heiligenkreuz, Helenental, Baden. This was all in the Russian zone, where we shouldn't have been and on top of that my bicycle refused to work properly. There was a Russian sentry post with a barrier to control the traffic. Thank goodness the barrier was up. We thought, ‘well, we must get past this Russian, we shouldn't be here, and if he sees us we'll be put into prison’. So we bicycled past as best we could, looking in the other direction so he couldn't see our faces. Thank goodness he didn't take any notice of us, so that was all right. Then we entered Baden. Baden was the largest headquarters of the Russian zone in Lower Austria. It was full of Russians. We had to find our way out of Baden on our bicycles and there were no signs that said "Vienna". I thought, this is a civilian, so I'll ask him in my best German, "please, which road leads to Vienna?" I got off and said this and he said in very guttural German, "Sie sind nicht von hier".  So I said, "Danke vielmals", straddled the bike and away we pedalled as quickly as we could. He was obviously a Russian in civilian dress and would have known straight away we shouldn't have been there. The next man I asked had a Gamsbart[1] in his hat. I thought, ‘he can't be a Russian, he must be an Austrian’. He told us which road to take, so we eventually made it back, all the way to Vienna. It was a marathon ride, just imagine, Hietzing, Purkersdorf, Klein Semmering, Helenental, Baden, then back into Hietzing. We were on our bicycles all day. Half the time my bicycle wouldn't work properly, because I was too heavy and the chain kept, not falling off, but I kept stepping through it somehow, it wouldn't work. We had to swap bicycles, Molly rode mine and I hers, thus we managed to return to Vienna. Then I couldn't find my keys to the house.

Another bicycle ride was with Evelyn Campbell, when I was working at the Consulate. We took our bicycles down on the train to Bruck an der Mur. We'd worked out the best way of cycling mainly downhill, with not too much uphill. We'd arranged how to come back – we had to be back by a certain time, put our bicycles on the train once more and catch the army lorry. We put our bikes on the train in Vienna to pick them up at the station in Bruck, do our bicycle tour, come back on the Sunday evening, load the bikes on the train and catch the army lorry. That all went all right and we cycled down to the Leopold Steiner See, down to Eisenherz, where we took the train up the steep hill as we couldn’t possibly push our bicycles up. We stayed the night in a farmhouse at the top of this hill. I remember sleeping in a room over the cowshed, there were cracks in the floor and you could see the cows down below and feel their warmth coming up. It didn't smell very pleasant. We cycled all the way down the hill on the other side, and eventually back via Leoben to Bruck an der Mur, but we'd missed the lorry. By the time we'd arrived there and loaded our bicycles on the train, it was too late, it had left. What should we do? We didn't have any money; we couldn't go on the train. We thought the only thing possible was to catch a lift. So we both stood on the edge of the road leading out of Bruck, the Triester Strasse, where all the traffic passed via the Semmering, down to Vienna. The bad thing was we didn't have any grey cards, and to pass through the Russian zone you had to have a grey card with the various stamps on it. There were Evelyn and I standing on the edge of this road, and I said, "now you put your hand up first", so she tried and nobody stopped. Then I tried and nobody stopped. We weren't very good at hitching a ride; we'd never tried it in our lives before! Eventually one kind man stopped to whom we explained the situation, and he drove us all the way home, he even dropped us off, first me then Evelyn. That was another bicycling adventure in Styria, the only place we were allowed to cycle, unless we were doing what we shouldn't have been doing in the Russian zone.

The whole of the Commission was closing down in 1947, ‘48 and I had already packed my trunks to send them home. I thought, “this is the end of my time in Vienna”. I used to organise weekends hiking in the mountains in Styria with Walter Ingham. His father had had a travel agency in Austria before the war, and he hoped to set it up again in London on his return to England. He offered me a job in London at £2 a week, a ridiculous salary, not enough to live on. I said, “I don't think so, thank you very much”. As the Commission was closing down the Legation was established in 1948, with a new minister. One of the heads of the Industry Branch of the Economic Division, Mr Daw, was offered the job as the first Commercial Counsellor in the Legation. He asked me if I wanted to work with him. I thought, ‘this is a good idea, the Foreign Office is a good thing’. The job should have gone to Rex Foy, he was a much more brilliant man than Mr Daw, but he’d behaved too badly. “Daddy Daw” was very much liked by everybody. He was an army man, a full Colonel, Rex Foy was only a four-star General. The Legation was situated in the 3^rd district in the Reisnerstrasse. It was a beautiful big house, which had been a block of luxurious flats belonging to Jewish owners. This had been requisitioned by the Germans, then the British, and was now leased to the British Government as the Chancery for the newly set up Legation, soon to become the official Embassy Offices. The British Ambassador’s Residence in the Metternichgasse around the corner had been bomb damaged and when renovated in 1949 the first British Ambassador after the war, Sir Harold Caccia, moved in. At this time each floor of the building in the Reisnerstrasse consisted of a huge flat complete with bathroom, kitchen and maid’s room, with a fire escape behind that. These were later converted to normal office rooms. The Embassy “Chancery” premises were in use till the nineties, when the lease was given up and a new office building erected at the back of the Residence garden with underground garages, just opposite our Anglican “Christ Church”, which lately celebrated its 125 Jubilee anniversary. This Victorian chapel-style Church was originally built in the Residence garden – but later separated by a newly-built road through the property, the Jaurèsgasse.

In the meantime I'd met my future husband, Max, at a Heuriger in Nussdorf. We met in September 1948, when a friend of mine came out from England and stayed with me. Phyllis Selby had worked with me at the boy’s school Fonthill. She’d stayed there during the war and we kept in touch. Phyllis visited me on a holiday arriving here safely the first time; the second time she was taken off the train by the Russians because she didn’t have the right stamps on her grey card. One had to have a grey card stamped by the Russians, the French, the British and the Americans when travelling on the Arlberg Express from Calais to Vienna. The Russians couldn’t read, but they could count the number of stamps on your card. We visited a Heuriger together with an Austrian couple and met Max there. Max happened to be living in Hietzing, so we decided to meet. If he hadn't been living in this area I probably would never have seen him again. That was a coincidence, it was probably Fate. We were sitting at a table, my girlfriend Phyllis and I, with this Austrian couple doing their best to speak proper German, as we couldn't understand any Viennese dialect. Max walked past and heard us speaking "Hoch Deutsch" and said, "Ah these ladies are speaking beautiful German". He was from Sudetenland where they spoke very excellent German. He sat at our table for a while and that's how I came to know him.

Now I will tell you a little about our first Christmas in Vienna in 1945. There was an Air Force Rest House in Styria, up in the mountains, above Gross Veitsch, called Hubertushof. I knew three Air Force Officers, Owen Piggott, a Wing Commander, Guy Bedford, a Lieutenant Colonel, and Squadron-Leader Williams. Together with several girls they’d arranged to spend Christmas there. We had to take everything with us, including all our rations, as there was little food to be had and we weren't allowed to eat any Austrian rations. We travelled in army cars as far as Gross Veitsch. Then there was a very steep and snowy road, leading (about 5 to 8 km) up to Hubertushof. They had sent a horse sleigh down to meet us and carry our luggage, so we could reach this house. However, one of the men thought, ‘well, we'll try to drive one of these trucks up, because we have all the food with us’. But the truck got stuck in the snow, one of the officers had to get out and, with the axes in the army trucks, cut off branches from the bushes next to the road to put under the wheels for grip. While he was cutting this brushwood he chopped his leg and needed medical attention. The car, with all the rations and the other officers, drove off to the nearest military hospital in Graz. There was only one other girl with us at this point; another joined us a little later. So there we were, the two of us, with the horse and the sledge and the luggage. We had to lead the horse with the sleigh up the hill, not knowing where we were going. The horse trudged up with us walking beside it holding the reigns; we hoped the horse knew the way. Eventually we made it up this very steep hill, it was a long, long walk, in deep snow, on a very icy road. The horse reached the top of the ridge and we said, “ah ha, there's a house to the right, that must be Hubertushof”. The horse, instead of walking up to the house, smelt his stable down below. He started to run, the horse ran away with the sledge and everything fell off, the entire luggage, the cushions and the food that we had on it! The horse galloped down the hill, down the road to his stables a long way down, below the house. The people from Hubertushof fortunately saw the chaos and came out to rescue us; at last we’d arrived. The poor man who'd chopped his leg was left in the hospital in Graz, and the others came back with the truck. A zither player arrived from the village and played for us. We did some skiing; there was a baby slope and as we weren't very proficient it was quite good enough for us. At New Year we tried our hand at Bleigiessen[2] and had a boar’s head, the Austrian custom on New Year’s Eve. The owners, a family Rotwangl with three sons, were very nice people, they were sweet.

We used to go to Hubertushof quite often. I took Max there later – he loved it. When Stephanie was born and she was small we went up there for Easter, Whitsun; all kinds of holidays were spent at Hubertushof. Frau Rotwangl, after her husband died, ran the place on her own with her growing sons. In 1992, when I was in hospital in Lilienfeld having injured my knee yet again, I was reading the newspaper and saw that Hubertushof had burnt down to the ground. It was a wooden house and Max was always saying, “it’s very dangerous, a wooden house. I hope it’s properly insured”.  The worst happened, it was completely burnt down in 1992. I’m still in touch with Frau Rotwangl, whose three boys are all married, or divorced, now.

Another Christmas in Austria was spent in Mariazell. The Post Hotel in Mariazell was a British Officer’s Hotel. We went skating on the Erlach See, just close by. The lake was completely frozen as though it was glass, you could see right through the ice, down to the pebbles at the bottom. This happens very seldom, generally when the ice freezes it’s cloudy, covered in snow and you can't see down at all. But this time it was completely and absolutely clear, an amazing experience. Once I went home to England for Christmas; then when I was married, Christmases were spent here in Vienna. I must tell you about our little car. When I was working at the Commercial Section of the Legation, an opportunity arose through an agent of the Morris Oxford Company, which used to produce all the Morris cars. For 300 Pounds it was possible to import a Morris Minor car. I thought this a wonderful idea. I wasn't very good at driving, but Max loved it. As I had £300 in my bank account in England, quite a lot of money in those days, I bought this little car, which we christened “Flavian”. It was wonderful; it had an open top, it was a cabriolet. We used to go for trips at the weekends with army petrol, as there was no other petrol to be had. I was allowed to have army petrol because it was my car though Max mostly drove it. I drove it once or twice, but I wasn't a very good driver. I'd passed my test in England at the beginning of the war and had an International Driver’s Licence, but I think my eyes weren't good enough. I also didn't like driving with the wild, Viennese drivers who shouted and yelled the whole time, so I left it to Max. He loved driving and we used to go for trips to the countryside at weekends and whenever we had enough petrol, which was also rationed.

[1] Gamsbart is a chamois brush, used to decorate traditional Austrian hats

[2] Bleigiessen: a game played at New Year whereby small lead figures are melted and thrown into cold water. The idea is to find out what the next year brings by analysing to the shape that’s formed in the water.

Kommentar schreiben

18 March 2003

It’s funny, I’m not officially working, in that I don’t go into an office, I don’t get a pay slip at the end of the month, and I don’t wear suits any longer, but I seem to be busier than ever! Sometimes I mention to friends that I’m a little stressed, but they seem to think I must be mad, after all, I don’t have a job, so how can I be stressed? And yet last night I sat glued to the computer screen translating the press text of Projekt Theater Studio till midnight. A fascinating performance is currently being rehearsed, a performance against the silence in Austria after the war. It gives me a different angle on life in Vienna, how Austrians are still affected by the aftermath of war. A very personal play looking at personal histories and magnifying them to include the thoughts and ideas of present day citizens. I look forward to seeing the production; I’ve never seen experimental theatre before. Since I have started writing this story I have learnt so much, and more new experiences are continually approaching. But first to the usual, the currently “normal” – afternoon tea with June and hoping I can help her overcome her depression of old age, worrying about her diminishing flexibility, ability to be independent. A fear I’m sure all of us face, or most of us will face some time in the future.

To take our minds off her creaky joints, I pull the last photo album from her cupboard. It’s heavy, large, and covered in leather. The first few pages filled with neatly glued in photos. 1949 – the last time Max went skiing, how he became increasingly fed-up with it and said he would give it up. June and Molly climbing the mountains in skirts. Barbara Wendling in a dirndl, an advert for smiling blond buxom health in the alps. The story of how Max was slightly annoyed when Barbara was the first to wear June’s “new” fur coat to an interview. His mother had had a coat of black sealskin where the sleeves were very worn out and these were replaced with the sleeves from another worn coat. June’s pride when she received it back from the dressmaker, though the kinds of fur didn’t quite match, but it was still a “proper fur coat”!

June tells me another story about the Borodin’s who were well informed on the black market and knew where one could get anything. They knew a furrier who would make her an opossum coat for £50. No money was allowed to be taken out of England, so £ note’s were very valuable on the black market. June therefore stuffed the money into the bottom of the talcum powder tin – they had removable bottoms in those days and were very handy for smuggling!  Max later had the coat refurbished and June still has it. Rather different from today’s H&M, Mango and Zara throwaway clothes mentality.

We talk about her astonishment when the New Look appeared – after the war skirts were more or less to the knee as everybody was saving fabric. One of the girls from the office, returning from a holiday in England, proudly displayed her voluminous skirts and coats, reaching almost to the ankle!

More stunning photos of mountain scenery, beautifully preserved in black and white. The story of a Whitsun trip with her friend Nell. Taking the train to Krimml Falls, being delayed and finally walking across to Kufstein in the moonlight. Nell laughing surrounded by “local men” whom she’d met skiing during the winter. Nell who was full of vim and vigour, a petite figure, carefree and relaxed in beautiful surroundings.

Later the photos become colour, the colour we automatically associate with the ‘60s and ‘70s, faded to a general orange brown hue, still to be seen Stephanie as a young girl playing with friends. Her first theatre production at the age of twelve, complete with scenery, staged for the proud parents of the ensemble in June’s living room. Family snapshots of happy holiday days, Max looking dapper and June smiling. Stephanie in her white silk ball gown in which she opened the ball in Schönbrunn. Later, at thirteen when she finally received her own room - up till then her bed had been kept in June and Max’s bedroom during the day and pushed into the lounge every night. When she was thirteen Max managed to obtain a room from the flat next door, the old door was blocked up and a door opened into the Schmiderer’s flat.

Now the photos come to an end, there are no more albums to carefully page through, reliving memories and recounting stories. Stephanie is grown-up and living in New York. June no longer travels much, though now I have pictures of her and Stephanie in my album, from the trip we took together two years ago, when I was still “working” and had a company car. We drove to Tragöss and I saw some of her beloved mountain scenery for myself.

Kommentar schreiben

I met Max in 1948, as I've told you, at the Heuriger in Nussdorf called “Franzl Schirz”. Max had studied architecture and the fine arts at Prague University, and was born in 1908, thus being 13 years older then I – curiously enough my father was 14 years older than my mother. We wished to get married in the summer of 1950 in England, but then Max, who was an architect and civil engineer, had a lot of work to do for the Vienna Fair and we couldn't get away, so we postponed it till September. I went back earlier, as I had to be in England for the Banns to be called. I travelled with my cousin David from New Zealand, who was studying music in Salzburg, and another friend, who was also here with the Commission and was going home. We went back on the train and then by boat; the entire journey took two days. Then there was I at home in Sussex, waiting for Max who was arriving about two weeks later. The wedding had been arranged for September 16 and everything was prepared. Max was going to drive the car as far as Feldkirch and leave it there, then travel on to England by train. Well, he did that, but he obviously left it rather late. He didn't get up very early in the morning after a rather late night with friends at the Ottakringer Bräu, a very excellent and well-known restaurant here in Hietzing, having told them he was going to drive to England the next day to get married. Everybody was horrified and didn't really believe he meant what he said. Anyhow, he made it in time to Feldkirch and obtained permission to garage the car in a coal shed, which he hoped would be all right. This was the only place available – there were big coal sheds in the station yard. Then he boarded the Arlberg Express in the nick of time and was on his way to London.

I was in Crawley Down, where my parents lived, and went up to London with Phyllis Selby, the friend who was on holiday in 1948 in Vienna when I first met Max. We knew which train he was coming on, so we were in Victoria Station in good time and waited. The boat train came in from Dover and everybody disembarked. No Max getting out of the train. I thought, ‘Oh goodness, now he's not coming, he's decided not to come, he’s jilted me, terrible!’ It had happened to another friend of mine, she was engaged to an Austrian, she'd arranged for him to come to the wedding in England and he'd never turned up. I thought, ‘now this has happened to me too!’ I received such a terrible shock. Everybody left the platform and I went to the stationmaster, the guard, and said, "is that the only train?" "Oh no, that's the first boat train. There are always two. You must wait for the next one." We waited with our fingers crossed for the next boat train to come in. About half an hour later the train arrived and out jumped Max, very jauntily with his Steirerhut. I said, "well, goodness me, whatever's happened?" "Oh", he said, "I didn't hurry up to get onto the first train, Dover was most interesting." He’d had a look round to see what was going on. He was a great observer and was enjoying himself on his first visit to England so took the second train. He had arrived, thank goodness. The situation was saved!

Max stayed at a friend’s place not far away, as it wasn’t the thing to do, to stay in the same place. The wedding went off very well, in our little church in Crawley Down, “All Saints” Crawley Down. I’d had a blue silk dress made for the occasion. There was no material to be bought in Vienna, but the dressmaker had connections to a firm in Switzerland. She provided this corded pale blue silk, which was designed as a kind of cocktail dress with a jacket and very beautiful. Stephanie still has the shoes, the plum-coloured suede shoes I wore. I carried a bouquet of roses in the same red colour to match. Max was not quite as tall as I; he was about half an inch shorter. In the wedding photos I’m standing about half a step behind him, so that our heights more or less equalled up. We had a wedding reception at our house in Crawley Down to which various school friends came after which we went up to London and spent a night in the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria Station. The next day we were leaving from Victoria to visit Max's Uncle who lived in Basel and was very ill in hospital. He was Max's mother's brother, and had been a prisoner of war in England during the First World War, so he spoke very good English. He was a chemist working for Ciba Geigy, the big chemical concern in Basel; he died about three years after our visit. We visited him in hospital in Basel, spending two nights with his wife in their house in Reinach. Then we boarded the train again and travelled to Feldkirch and picked up the car, which was fortunately still there though rather grimy with coal dust. We wanted to go south and arrived at some border to Italy where they wouldn't let us through – something to do with our papers. So we had to go back and over the Stelvio pass. We spent the first night in a Gasthaus at the top of this pass. I remember it was very, very cold and I had a terrible sore throat. The next day we drove down to Meran, and then through to Bozen and via St Ulrich, the Seiser Alm, all through the magnificent Dolomite scenery to Venice. It was wonderful to see all these places again, where I’d been stationed with the Allied Military Government in ’45 for two months. In Venice we found a small hotel. It was very expensive and we had very little money, so we'd taken all sorts of provisions with us from England such as tins of sardines, cheese – you know, Kraft cheese. We bought rolls and generally had a picnic lunch in the hotel bedroom and went out, had some spaghetti or suchlike, in the evenings. We went bathing on the Lido and visited Murano to watch them making glass. We bought some beautiful Murano glass candlesticks which we saw being made – two pairs of golden dolphins. Max bought me a ring, a cluster of small blue opals, my favourite stones, in the form of a flower. The engagement ring was a blue signet ring engraved with the Schmiderer crest – so this opal ring was something in addition. He paid for it in exchange for a gold watch given to him by his uncle in Basel. I still have the ring, but unfortunately it won't go on my finger any longer, my joints are too swollen.

That was our honeymoon. We came back a different way, via Carinthia. I wanted to go over the Gross Glockner, though Max said, "oh we'll never get over the Gross Glockner, its much too steep for this poor little car." I said, "yes, we must go over the Gross Glockner”, I had set my heart on doing so. Up we went, up over the mountain and the car started to boil – steam was coming out of the radiator. We had to wait till it cooled down, and filled it up again with water. Eventually we got over the Pass and I was happy. In Heiligenblut I afforded myself a pair of made-to-measure mountain boots, which I had for a long time. I was determined to have some good walking boots because I loved walking in the mountains. We came back via Schladming, in Styria, and spent a night at the Hotel Post. That was when we heard on the wireless or in the newspaper that there was going to be a revolution in Vienna, when all the Austrian Communist workers, at the instigation of the Russians, were going to march against the government. We thought there was going to be some kind of coup when the Russians would take over altogether and that would have been a terrible disaster. Thank goodness it quietened down. We wondered, should we go back, should we stay here, was Vienna going to be cut off by the Russians, were we going to be caught or not? In the end, Max said, “no, we'll try to get back”. So off we went. I had an Austrian identity card, so nothing could happen to me. Anyhow we got through all right, back to Vienna. The very next day I started work at the Consulate. Then I was no longer a member of the Legation, I was a locally engaged employee of the British Legation working at the Consulate in the Wallnerstrasse. It was there I met my very good friend, up to this very day, Evelyn Campbell, with whom I used to go on walking holidays in the Dolomites. She left in 1952 to work with NATO in Paris and had a very good job there. Then NATO transferred itself to Brussels, but she didn't follow them there, instead becoming an independent shorthand writer. She used to go to various international conferences all over Europe and managed to earn her living that way. I visited her once or twice in Paris where she had a very nice small flat on the 4^th floor of a house with no lift and a very steep staircase!

I had to leave the Legation because I was married to an Austrian and for security reasons could not remain there. In theory I could have been got at by the Russians, who had their Embassy practically opposite ours in the Reisnerstrasse. And thus the Foreign Office transferred me to the Consulate as a locally engaged Austrian employee, where there was no risk of giving away any secrets! Though we didn't have any secrets in the Commercial Section. When I was married I had to take on Austrian nationality, which I did not want. I lost my British passport, because I was born in Australia and my father having been born in India. I was the second generation born out of England and so, according to the British Nationality Law of those days I was no longer entitled to a British passport. I could apply for an Australian passport, having been born in Australia. But I wasn’t keen on having an Australian passport as one couldn't travel around Europe without visas with such a document. It was all extremely complicated. Anyhow, I felt no wish to have an Australian passport as I felt more English than Australian. To receive a British passport again, I had to swear the Oath of Allegiance to the Queen. As I was working at the Consulate it wasn't so difficult and I got my English passport back again in my married name. Thereafter I had two passports, one British and one Austrian.

At the Consulate I was paid a much lower salary, I naturally had no British rations and I had no means of getting any goods from the NAAFI. There was nothing on the Austrian market, very little food and all rationed. Evelyn used to buy things from the NAAFI for me, because I was no longer allowed to use it. All my privileges were taken from me; I was reduced to the Austrian rate of salary, which was very small compared to the Foreign Office salary. It was a completely different life and difficult to start off with. We didn't quite starve, but it was difficult, the transition from being English to being Austrian. Another unpleasant thing was, I wasn't entrusted with anything confidential any longer. The Box used to come over from the Legation and I wasn't allowed to touch the key, I wasn't allowed to touch the Box, I wasn't allowed to take the files out that had come from the Embassy to the Consulate. This was a very degrading kind of feeling, having worked at 10 Downing Street all through the war where we had the highest of the very top secrets going through our hands and I’d never even kept a diary (which I almost regret sometimes now, plenty of the other girls did). Having kept to the rules and regulations. "You're Austrian now, you're not to be trusted", it was very upsetting, a real disadvantage. But the people in the office were very nice. We used to go out for lunch together, there was a little vegetarian restaurant round the corner. We could also eat meals at the Hotel Sacher, the British Transit Hotel if invited. I used to have the cheapest menu in this little restaurant, which cost two Shillings 50 Pfennig. That was the very cheapest. Evelyn sometimes had a very expensive menu; she was on the British system and was paid properly. She ordered the menu for 5 or 7 Schillings. Those were the prices in those days. I kept an accounts book of what things cost, which was very, very little. (I had a permanent wave in my hair done in 1946, it wasn't very good and cost 12.60 Schillings.) There was a Count Paul Esterhazy who used to come to this little restaurant, all the best people used to come; none of them had any money anyhow. We used to have delightful table neighbours. Evelyn had a lot of aristocratic friends when she first came out, all the old Austrian names. Evelyn knew quite a lot of them; so I got to know them as well, which was fascinating.

Now I’ll tell you a little about my time at the British Consulate, where I started on October 1, 1950 after I married and remained until October 1956, when I moved back to the Embassy after the Treaty had been signed in 1955 and Austria regained her independence. The Consulate was in an old palace in the Wallnerstrasse 8, on the first floor with a normal entrance as to a private residence. The palace was a listed building with some beautiful frescos on the wall in the big Public Office where the public was received. You didn’t need to ring on a bell to enter, unless it was lunchtime and people were out. On entering, to the right was an alcove where grey-haired Herr Bayerl, the Austrian messenger used to sit, who took letters to the post and such things. In the next room, where the frescos were, was a long wall-to-wall counter where the public was attended to and behind this to the left two desks – one for Herr Sauberer, the clerk, one for Walter Reitmayer, who did the pensions for the elderly British Residents who’d been in Vienna since before the war. In the middle of the room was a large circular table where documents and passports were stamped and signed. There was also the card index of all the registered British residents, who were required to register annually. Behind this office was the Vice-Consul’s office, where the door was always open so he could see what was going on. There was no special security until the IRA bombings started and then things changed. When the lease came to an end the Consulate was moved to the Embassy Office building in the Reisnerstrasse in the 3^rd district. The Consulate had been located in the 1^st district in the Wallnerstrasse since the 1920s.

So, there was the Consul, Mr Reuterdahl, and the Vice-Consul, Mr Croxen. The other Austrian, Herr Sauberer, the clerk who made the passports and did the accounts, later became Pro-Consul and was given an MBE[1]. He certainly deserved it, he kept an eye on the Consulate during the war. Herr Sauberer, Herr Bayerl, Evelyn and I, made up the staff. Evelyn was the Consul’s secretary. I was in charge of the files and archives, did some shorthand and typing and learnt how to make passports. I also had to learn how to do the accounts to cover for Herr Sauberer when he went on holiday. That was rather a nightmare, as I never really learnt to add up in my head – mental arithmetic not being my strong point. But I certainly learnt there, how to do it in my head instead of on my fingers! We had a lot of pensions to pay out for the Austrian wives of British soldiers who’d been divorced and remained in Austria, and to some old English ladies who had married Austrians. We had a Benevolent Fund for looking after these old people, of which there were many. It was my job to organise the Benevolent Fund and to visit these old ladies to find out how they were getting on. I was taken by the office car and vividly remember a visit in November, it was raining, grey and very miserable. It was depressing – climbing up stairs in old, dark houses and seeing under what conditions these old people were living, existing on practically nothing. They used to get extra coal fuel at Christmas supplied by the British Army. There was no fuel on the Austrian market, it was extremely scarce. They had very little money; but they received a certain amount every month from the Benevolent Fund. I asked one of them why she didn’t go back to England under the repatriation scheme for Benevolent Subjects. I said, “have you got nobody in England?” I couldn’t understand why they didn’t leave, because conditions here were so awful in those days, after the war. “No, no, my husband’s grave is here, this is where my home is”. Now I’ve reached that stage myself and people have asked why don’t I return to England. I don’t say my husband’s grave is here, but I say I’ve got so used to being here it would be too much of an upheaval to go back and I wouldn’t have anywhere to go except to a retirement home. Now I understand why most of them preferred to stay, even under difficult conditions. I used to argue, “you could go back, you could be repatriated!” “No, no” they said. They had a British club, which used to meet Tuesday and Thursday mornings in the back room of the Consulate, called “The Club”. All the old people came, expatriates, men and women; they made tea in the back room, we provided the tea, milk and biscuits. I remember Mrs Wotch, one of the old ladies, whom I never saw without her hat on. We used to chat to them, they were a nice lot.

One of the great excitements – we experienced divorce cases. Quite a lot of English and Americans had married Austrians and there were a number of divorce cases taking place. The British were working with the refugee organisation UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency), a large agency that administered camps in the Salzburg area. (The Sudeten-Germans weren’t allowed any help from this organisation, as they were not considered refugees despite having been evicted from Czechoslovakia and lost all their belongings. They were still regarded as the enemy.) There were a number of divorce cases going on amongst the UNRRA staff. Lawyers came from England to take evidence and the hearings had to take place at the Consulate and then be sent to the Divorce Court in England.

We had two British lawyers in Vienna, each representing an opposing party. Evelyn and I had to take it in turns to take down in shorthand all the evidence at these hearings. This was a great responsibility and rather terrifying because we had to swear on Oath that we would take all statements down and transcribe them absolutely correctly, to the best of our ability. It was a very responsible kind of thing to do, to take down the evidence. The Consul warned us beforehand, "you two girls, there might be some details that are not very nice in a divorce case. So you must not be shocked if there are some expressions you've never heard of. I hope you don’t mind having to write all this down?” “No” we said, “it won’t worry us”. He was very concerned about us. It was not very pleasant hearing, all kinds of intimate details were asked by the lawyers. When the statements were transcribed we once more had to swear that it was the truth, and that we’d taken down everything exactly and to the best of our ability to be decided by the Divorce Courts. The evidence was then sent to the Courts in London. That was one of the Consulate tasks in those days, to take evidence for court cases.

At the Consulate we had an inspection. One of the Foreign Office inspectors was a man called Brown, formerly one of the junior secretaries to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. He returned to the Foreign Office after the War and came out to Vienna as an Inspector. When he arrived I had an interview with him and said “I’d like to apply for a promotion as I’ve been at the Consulate for six years.” I thought it was about time I received some promotion. In the end this was agreed and I was promoted one level higher, as a locally engaged grade two, until then I’d been a grade three. I earned a bit more money, which was a help and finally was even allowed to go back to the Embassy, in the Reisnerstrasse. I was so attached to the Consulate by this time, I felt quite sad at returning to the Embassy and it took time getting used to it again. But there were nice people there too and quite a few locally engaged. There was Herr Kaltenbrunner, originally in charge of the car service up in the barracks, but after the British troops left he was also in the Commercial Section. He was an Adjutant in the Austrian German Army during the War and then a Prisoner of War in the West of England. He was, what I call ‘one of the nice, upright Viennese’. There were only two I ever met, Kaltenbrunner and Sauberer at the Consulate. When I first started at the Legation, before I was married, we had an office boy called Walter, Walter Reitmayer. He joined as a messenger at the age of 15 and used to bring us our lunch, run round and do things for us. He was very amenable to helping people and doing things for everybody. Then he was sent over to the Consulate, and when Bayerl, the old man who was the messenger there, retired Walter became the new young messenger. He handled all the pensions, the odd jobs. He worked himself up in time to become Pro-Consul in the Consulate. So it just proves that with no further education, no Matura, no nothing, except intelligence, hard work and reliability one can progress up the ladder in the English Foreign Service system, which would be impossible in Austria. They now have a Vice-Consul, actually she’s just retired, a woman who started off in the Consulate as a shorthand typist – also locally engaged.

 After getting married in 1950 I moved into my husband’s flat, where I still live today – where my husband and his mother were living, arriving in Vienna as refugees from Czechoslovakia. Max was always having girlfriends and was engaged to Yvonne Fiala when I met him, with a gold ring on his finger. Her parents and her brother were all living in this flat then. On getting to know her, Max found the family a small house in Ober St. Veit. So they moved out and as commission he arranged with the owner of the house that he would take over this flat without any extra charges. He and his mother moved in, in October 1948. His mother died of a heart attack on the 19 February 1949, just after my birthday. She just dropped down dead in the kitchen while making Max’s supper, she was only 68. It is a ground floor flat with three rooms, unfurnished. Max bought some old furniture from the Dorotheum, an antique dealership in Vienna. There was a big kitchen with one washbasin and a little gas rechaud – meaning two burners for cooking on a table. No bathroom, no means of heating any water other than by boiling a kettle. The lavatory had to be reached from the outside, from the passageway. The lavatory originally belonged to this flat, but during the war many refugees moved into the empty rooms on the ground floor of the house and as they had no lavatory the door to the lavatory from this flat was blocked up and a door made from the passageway to enable the other families to use it. When I came I didn’t like the idea of having to go out into the passageway and the then house owner, who really was a gentleman, allowed us to re-open the door from our flat into the lavatory again. Now we have a peculiar system with two doors to one lavatory. I should think that's the one and only lavatory in Vienna that has two doors, one from each side. There were many complications to start off with, people who bolted the door, then the other party couldn't get in, and altercations more often than not. It is still in that condition today, though not so many people use it now, thank goodness. The current owner of the house insists on having its use for his clients. He is a patent lawyer and cannot be classed as a gentleman! In the lavatory the owner of the house now has his own box for toilet paper for the office and this was empty for about two weeks recently. So of course anybody who uses the toilet uses mine. One day I saw their cleaning lady, she doesn’t speak much German, but she seemed to understand my request. Nothing happened, so when I happened to see the secretary who works in the owner’s office and also uses my toilet I told him. He mumbled something and went back into the office. A short while later my phone rang and it was my landlord, “please can you refrain from giving my servants orders. Whether or not toilet paper is supplied is none of your business. If you don’t wish your toilet paper to be used you must remove it”.

There was no bathroom in the flat. My father gave me 50 Pounds as a wedding present to build a bathroom, a lot of money in those days. My husband, being an architect, had the bathroom built into the kitchen, which was big enough and had two windows. There were no cupboards at all when I moved in, so I had to put any bits of crockery I had onto the floor until we had two cupboards built, where all the glass and china was put. There was an old coal box where the coal/coke was kept; we also had a coal cellar down below, which was very dark and dirty with very rickety stairs and no light. There were two tiled coal or coke burning stoves, one in the room that was Max’s office, and one in the sitting room, but nothing in the bedroom. That's still the way it is, there's no heating in the bedroom. We now have a tiled gas stove in the sitting room, which heats up the two main rooms, though no heating in the bathroom, in the kitchen, or in Stephanie's small room, which we later acquired from the neighbouring flat. In spite of this we manage quite well with a blow heater in the bathroom, and a small electric radiator for Stephanie's room, which I brought from England in the 1950's, and is still working creating a very warm atmosphere when switched on. Everything was primitive in Vienna as far as I was concerned in those days, with communal lavatories on the corridors in the old houses, which still exist to some extent today in the poorer districts. The first Christmas of our married life we held a big a morning sherry party, as a kind of housewarming, with both Embassy and Austrian friends. We placed a large Christmas tree in the corner of the sitting room – as there was not much furniture there was plenty of space! We had practically no carpets, but with parquet flooring that didn’t matter so much. It was a lovely party.

During the first year of our marriage, in the summer of 1951, my mother came out from England with my Uncle Barclay and his wife, Aunty Vida who were over from New Zealand. They travelled by car, a Rover of which Uncle Barclay was very proud, and stayed at the Park Hotel in Hietzing. It was a very pleasant summer. Work in the office wasn't very strenuous and Max was doing quite well as a free-lance architect. For our holiday in September we drove to the Weissensee in Carinthia. Swimming in the milky warm water was a real pleasure. The autumn came and things in the flat were improving slightly as Max bought more furniture from the Dorotheum. We had a couch – a so-called Biedermayer “canapé” – purchased when he and his mother first moved in for her to sleep on. He had his bed, which he'd borrowed from the owner living upstairs. When we were married we only had this one bed, which wasn't very large, and the canapé, no cupboards except for one large white double wardrobe in the bedroom, but it didn't seem to worry us so much then. Max had a beautiful dressing table made for me out of an old writing desk. He'd drawn the plans for it and the carpenter adapted it accordingly. From London we had brought pale blue glazed chintz patterned with bunches of pink roses to make the flounced skirts around it, under the kidney-shaped top surface. The dressing table is still in existence, 50 years on, in spite of its original freshness being somewhat dimmed. We bought a Baroque gilded mirror to hang above it and a cherub to hang above that, Max was very keen on anything Baroque. We went into town on the Saturday before Christmas, Christmas must have been on the Tuesday, and bought the mirror, an old one, but it was very pretty. We already had the Baroque cherub, the gilded sidelights, so it was a very 50ish style bedroom. Nothing has changed so very much in this flat since those early days of our marriage.

[1] MBE: Member of the British Empire

Kommentar schreiben

25 March 2003

I’m sitting in a quaint Swiss town called Zofingen waiting for 9am to arrive. I have a meeting with an old-world hat shop judging by its exterior. I wonder what she’ll buy. I’m determined to sell some hats today, after being stood up in Luzern yesterday. Later this afternoon I have a meeting in Basel, from which I’m hoping for good results. Its funny this new job, which isn’t a “real” job, but I hope it will blossom into something – at the very least cover my petrol charges! I’m now a hat sales representative in addition to my other lives, my link to the world of fashion is intact again and I have an excuse for getting to know Switzerland.

Yesterday I looked through my grandmother’s things still in Arisdorf. Bitter-sweet memories pulling at my tear ducts. I have to say a final farewell. Goodbye to carefree holidays with a loving grandmother. Goodbye to our attempt to purchase the property. We don’t have quite enough capital to assuage the appetites of relatives who somehow feel they will make a certain financial gain on selling an old house with no heating. I sat in the March sunshine on the balcony and dreamed what it would have been like to live here. It would have been a “maximum challenge”, probably an immense strain on our very young married life. But it’s lovely to dream. I like the space, the garden, my grandfather’s old carpentry would have been the perfect studio and gallery. But we love Vienna, the scope and beauty of the city. The charm, ornate and splendid. The ease of life there. According to a recent survey, the Swiss are the happiest people in Europe. I hope that includes the Swiss abroad, but fear it doesn’t!

I read a newspaper article about an old lady now living in Arisdorf who lived and worked in Shanghai during the war and her memories of the Japanese throwing the American hotel guests out of the window. I decide to call her and ask if she would spare a few minutes to speak to me about her life. Unfortunately she doesn’t.

Gottfried Kure calls me and thanks me for my email. As June would say, “a real gentleman”, with a beard and pipe. He says if I can find sponsorship, his aunt would print this book. He has written several books on model railways himself and normally checks the financing before starting to write. I’m doing it the wrong way round! I, of course, haven’t found anyone to publish it yet – I haven’t really been looking as the text is not yet polished. He does give me a good idea however – I should ask the British Society in Vienna if they would be interested. I become very excited when I think of all these possibilities.

Kommentar schreiben

On that Saturday before Christmas, 1951, we went out for lunch and had coffee at the Arabia coffee house that had just been opened on the corner of the Graben and Kohlmarkt. It no longer exists now having been turned into some boutique. We came home, hung up the mirror and went to have dinner at the Ottakringer Braeu, a very excellent and famous restaurant in Hietzing in those days. It’s now called the Hietzinger Braeu, is very expensive but unfortunately not as good as in former times. I still have a Menu dated 29 May 1956 framed and hanging in my kitchen; roast chicken was the most expensive meal and beefsteak much cheaper. Chicken was a luxury; obviously there weren't very many chickens around then. That evening we met friends there, an English couple who worked at the Consulate and we knew quite well. They also lived in Hietzing, which, being the British zone, meant most of the people working in the Embassy had flats there. Max and George Kingston used to love playing chess together, so after dinner Max suggested that I go home, as I was no chess player. They brought me home and he and George went off to play chess. I went to bed and thought he'd be home sometime later. The next thing I heard was a loud ringing on the doorbell. I jumped up in a great state, and looked at the time, it was 5 o'clock in the morning! Outside the door stood a policeman and the sister of the man who owns the house, Frau Zinsler. "Your husband has been involved in a bad accident, he's in the Zweite Unfallsstation in the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, you must come straight away!" I said, "where is that?" I had no idea. They told me how to get there. It was a terrible shock. I had to get dressed, get on the underground, get on the tram, go down to the Spitalgasse, where the hospital was. I didn't know my way around Vienna very well. There were two Accident Stations or Casualty Departments there, the First and the Second. Any accidents brought in on uneven dates went to the Second and accidents brought in on an even dates to the First. Max went to the Zweite Unfalllstation. I saw him there, lying on a bed with his face all damaged, his eyes all crooked, his legs hung up with weights. He could hardly speak. I didn't know what had happened. I had to go to the Hospital administration office and tell them who we were and find out what was happening. We had no state health insurance in those days. Max was self-employed and had a private Austrian health insurance, so I gave them all those details. You can't imagine how terrible it was and what a state of shock I was in. I went home. There was nothing I could do. That was on the Sunday. I remember then going to Christ Church for carol singing practice and I couldn't even tell anybody what had happened as I was so overwhelmed by the shock of it all. I called George and he went with me to the police where we picked up all Max's documents, taken off him after the accident. It had happened like this: he'd left George Kingston and entered the Hietzinger Weinstube to have a nightcap on his way home. There he met some other friends, who suggested they all go into town. Everyone was in a Christmas mood at that moment, so Max of course said, "I'll come too". But the man who was driving the car – it was a very small car with two seats in the front and it opened at the back where another couple were sitting – drove much too fast on the very icy Schönbrunner Strasse. His name was Neunteufel, “nine devils” and he’d been a fighter pilot in the German army during the war so he no doubt he liked speed. The car skidded and hit a tree at a great tempo. The side where Max was sitting, to the right of the driver, hit a tree. The driver suffered from a broken nose, while the couple sitting in the back – he had an internal injury and his wife was killed. Max was very badly injured. There was a court case against the driver, but it was immaterial to the court case later against the hospital. Neunteufel never kept in touch with Max after that, I think he left Austria altogether. All Max’s teeth were broken, he had suffered a Schädelbasis Bruch and a Jochbogenbruch[1] and bones in his head were damaged. Thank goodness his brain wasn't affected. Both legs were broken. As a result he was in this terrible hospital for over a year. The conditions were indescribable and the treatment ditto, it was like being in a hospital in Dickens’s day. The doctors were irresponsible, Professor Denk was in charge, but he took no interest in the patients.  Max was treated in the wrong manner. His leg was stretched on weights, then put in plaster, the plaster was wrongly set, so they had to take it off again and re-break the leg, and do it all over again. The doctor in charge was called Salem and later made a great name for himself as an orthopaedic doctor in charge of the orthopaedic section at the Wilhelminen Spital, but at the Zweite Unfallstation he was extremely incompetent. He used to come into the ward, turn round, say "everything all right?" and go out again without even looking at or examining the patients. He never looked at the patients at all; they were just left to themselves. There was poor Max in this terrible "Gipshose", plaster trouser suit, right up to his armpits. I used to visit him at lunchtimes and in the evening, every day from the office. At lunchtime from the Consulate, then in the evening before I went home. I used to massage his tummy; there was a little space left where there was no plaster, because his bowels weren't working. They gave him enemas and nothing happened. It was terrible. The bone was hardly mended when they shut down this Unfallstation for the summer holidays. The patients were relocated to the surgical department with 20 to 25 beds. Max was a great smoker and in the surgical ward one wasn’t allowed to smoke, so he wasn’t looking forward to that. One day he was trying to exercise his leg in order to make the knee move. They had a kind of contraption where he had his leg in a sling and he pulled on a rope to make a pulley go up and down. It was meant to make the knee start to work again as it was quite stiff having been in plaster for six months. However, the rope broke and the leg fell down onto the bed. I informed the nurses, but they said, “oh, we don't have any rope, you go and buy some rope for your husband". So I had to go out and buy a length of rope in order to repair this contraption – those were the conditions in the hospital.

As nothing was going right with his leg, I'd asked for a second opinion. The best man for breakages in Vienna was Professor Boehler. I'd never heard of him, being strange to the country, like Max who only arrived in 1945, from Reichenberg in Sudetenland. I visited Professor Boehler to see if he couldn't come and have a look at Max, for a second opinion. However, the hospital said, “no”, “no that wasn't allowed, they couldn't have Professor Boehler visit”. I was so determined that something must be done, I asked the Embassy to interfere. At last they obtained permission from the hospital for Professor Boehler to come and take a look at Max. All the patients were washed, put into clean sheets, new shirts and the whole place was scrubbed clean for the visit. Professor Boehler was very well known for being a great stickler for cleanliness and order. There was no order in this horrible hospital, it was disgusting. The only people who were any good were the nurses, they did their best. So Professor Boehler came and he said, “there's nothing to be done, the bone just has to heal and it will take time. If necessary, you can always bring him to me.” This was in July 1952. I thought, ‘let's wait and see’.

The bones in Max's head were so broken, in his forehead, that his eyes were quite crooked. One eye was up and one eye was down. He saw three of four nurses coming into the room instead of one, he couldn't focus. He insisted he should be taken to the eye section of the hospital. He was carried over on a stretcher and put down on the stone floor, where he was left lying for about two hours, until an eye doctor came past and said, "what is wrong with you? I see you have a glass eye". Max didn't have a glass eye, she wasn't even capable of recognising what was wrong with him, that the eyes had been distorted so much because of the breakage of the bones. They said, “there's nothing we can do” and sent him back again. He later saw an excellent eye specialist when he was with Professor Boehler who looked at him and said he thought the eyes would right themselves. In the end they did, the eyes went back to their correct position. He had very good eyesight, which as an architect was most important to him, though he couldn't work after this long time in hospital. It was a miracle that the eyes returned to their normal position. Later, when all the bones had healed up in the forehead, one could see where the bone had slipped, because the lines on his forehead had slipped too.

Now in the summer holidays Max was in this surgical ward of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus where he wasn't allowed to smoke. They kindly said they would push his bed out into the corridor once every morning so he could have a cigarette. One morning they were pushing him out and another patient was pulling the bed, which was set on wheels. Then the whole bed tipped over, it had been incorrectly mounted on the wheels and the pushing and the pulling had unbalanced it. There was Max, lying on the stone floor, his leg, which had hardly healed, broken once more. He was put on the bed again and left there a whole day, without even a splint or anything to support his leg. They just left him lying there in the surgical ward, with no treatment whatsoever. One of the patients rang me at work, "do come quickly, something terrible has happened to your husband." I went straight away to the hospital and saw what had happened. I was so furious, I rang up Professor Boehler, "can I bring him to you?" He said, “yes of course” when I explained what had happened. I rang up the ambulance, marched in with the ambulance man and we took Max out without telling the hospital anything; we just took him away and brought him to Professor Boehler. There it was quite a different atmosphere, it was clean, tidy, and they were excellent doctors. No comparison at all. All they could do was to operate again and pin the bone with a pin down through the marrow. That was the latest method of mending thighbones, as yet unheard of in the Zweite Unfallstation. The operation was carried out in July in extremely hot weather. After the operation I went to England for two weeks to see my parents as Max was in good hands and persuaded me to go.

When I returned, it went on for ages. Max’s bone became infected, osteomyelitis, Knochenmarkseiterung. It wouldn't heal up; he had a fistula there for weeks and months. At one stage the doctors wanted to amputate his leg, but Max wouldn’t allow it – he said he’d rather shoot himself! He was in that hospital for nearly three years. Coming home for a couple of weeks then going in again for a new operation – to try and clear up the osteomyelitis, a very malignant kind of sepsis in the centre of the bone. He was in and out of hospital till about 1954. The accident happened a year after we were married in December 1951. He was in that terrible Zweite Unfallsstation for about six months; it was a scandal, a complete and utter scandal. In those days there was no “Patientenanwalt” or Patients’ Lawyer and no redress for any accident or maltreatment occurring to a patient while in hospital. When he was in the Boehler hospital they treated him very well, but he unfortunately caught this infection. He was in and out of hospital, in plaster and out of plaster. It was suppurating, the poison would come through the plaster, then to the hospital again, take the plaster off, have another operation to get it cleared out. He was on antibiotics all the time. Finally by 1954 the bone was healed up enough so he could walk with crutches. But the fistula never healed properly and had to be treated every now and again. Max always said, when it started to open up again, "ah that's good, the poison is coming out”. He was a great optimist. When it healed up again, he said, "ah that's very good, that means the poisons gone and it’s going to get better." That was the way he looked at his problem. If he hadn't been such an optimist I don't know how he would have managed. I was still visiting him in hospital twice every day from the office, the only day I generally didn't go was on a Sunday, then I would go for a walk in the woods or meet friends. Max didn't mind that, because there were so many visitors on a Sunday, they all made such a noise that it put him to sleep. I spent most of Saturday at the hospital. It was a great struggle. The Viennese were so unkind and rude, I disliked them intensely. I had so many bad experiences; I don't know whether they didn't like the English or what it was. Here in the house, on the streets. It was probably because I was a foreigner, the Occupying Force so to speak. I didn’t realise this at the time. I would suddenly be attacked for doing something I thought quite innocuous, for example leaving a door open. I had the misfortune of being here alone, with no relations or family of any kind. My only support was the office. If I’d had somebody at my side it would have been all right, but after Max’s accident I was left high and dry at the mercy of all these ‘nasties’ as I used to call them. It was the unexpectedness of the nastiness that used to get at me. I hadn’t realised I always took people at their face value and thought they were nice. In the England I grew up in, people were always kind and polite to each other. Here people were so aggressive to me as well as to each other – no doubt due to the Viennese mixture of Austrian, Czech, Hungarian, Croatian etc. The “golden Viennese heart” (das goldene Wiener Herz) they were so proud of was not at all apparent to me!

There was the famous occasion when I was going from the office to see Max in the Arbeiterunfall (Boehler’s hospital), across the Friedensbrücke at lunchtime. The bus from the Boerse, the Stock Exchange, went as far as Franz Joseph’s Station, where it would wait, then return on the same route. This lunchtime there was nobody else left on the bus, it was approaching the final stop, and where the bus should have stopped the driver didn't actually halt, just drove very slowly, opened the doors and expected me to jump out. "I'm not going to jump out, please stop the bus and let me out." "If you don't get out, you stay on the bus." The conductor closed the doors and the bus drove round to the place where they had their break, before they started on their trip back into Vienna again. I said, "what is your number, I'm going to report you for doing this, for not stopping the bus and letting me get out as you should have done." He started to shout at me in this disgusting abusive Viennese dialect. I couldn't bear it any longer and hit him as hard as I could in his face with the flat of my hand, just to stop this awful, awful language. My nerves were in a very bad state, and I immediately knew I shouldn't have done that. He raised his arm and advanced on me, I retreated to the back of the bus. He kept on shouting at me. I said, "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done it, it was a very wrong thing to have done." "No, no, we are going to take you off to the police station." The whole bus – the bus, the bus driver, the conductor and I – drove round to the police station. He marched me into the police office and told them what I had done – I'd insulted a public servant, this that and the other thing. I said, "I'm English, and I work at the British Embassy, I'm very sorry that I've done it, I knew I shouldn't have done that, but my nerves are very bad, I'm on my way to visit my husband in hospital, he's been so very ill for such a long time." "That doesn't matter, you will be taken to court for insulting a public servant, then if you're convicted you'll have a blot on your copybook, your Leumundszeugnis (The “Certificate of Good Conduct”)." When they let me go, I went over to see Max and told him all about it. He said don't worry, everything will be all right, which helped calm me down.

The next day there was a large paragraph in the Arbeiterzeitung (Worker’s Newspaper), "Das soll sie in London probieren".[2] There was the story, a terrible English woman hitting poor Austrian bus conductor and all the awful things I'd done and that there was going to be a court case. I was terrified at the thought I would have to go to court, I didn't have anybody here except the Consulate behind me, and this was in the newspaper! Everybody thought it was a great joke – all the doctors laughed in the hospital, Max laughed, the Consul laughed and said, "you should have hit him twice"; so that's the way they took it. But it was no joke for me, I thought I was going to be arrested at any moment; if I saw a policeman on the pavement anywhere near me I would cross to the other side of the road. My nerves were in such a bad state I was having nightmares. It had happened in the American zone and we didn't have any influence on the Austrian Authorities in the American zone. If it had happened in the English zone it would have been easier. The Embassy had to negotiate with the Americans, the Americans negotiated with the police and in the end there was so much backwards and forwards they became fed-up. Even the poor bus conductor finally apologised for making such a fuss. This went on for weeks, if not for a few months. Eventually they decided to forget about it, it was written off the books, so I didn't have to be brought up before a court. This was an immense relief. I wanted to relinquish my Austrian nationality as I disliked the Viennese mentality to such an extent, but was told I could only do this if I obtained a divorce. Of course I didn't want to do that so I had to remain an Austrian national, in spite of not wanting to have Austrian citizenship at the outset – but there was no option in those days. Now the Nationality Law is quite different.

Max was determined to sue the hospital. It wasn’t possible to sue the doctor for the treatment in the Zweite Unfallstation. The doctors were above suspicion; the doctors could do no wrong even though way they treated him in that hospital was quite horrific. It was difficult to find witnesses because the nurse who'd been pushing the bed had emigrated to Australia; the patient who had been pulling the bed was only found with great difficulty. The court case went on for three years against the Gemeinde Wien who were responsible for the public hospitals in Vienna. The case went up to a Higher Instance where it was refused and sent down to the Lower Court again. Max wouldn't give up, he collected all the evidence where he could himself, which his lawyer presented at court. In the end, after despairing of ever finding justice in Austria, we won it. The lawyer representing the Gemeinde Wien was the grandson of one of the Kaiser's family. He was a gentleman, which was a help. The case went to the upper court about three times, until we received statements from the nurse who'd gone to Australia, and the other patients who'd seen Max being tipped off the bed and nobody doing anything about it. Max was awarded damages and Schmerzensgeld. Not terribly much, but at least justice had been done. He also received some money for rehabilitation. It was a great start to our marriage; I was here on my own in the flat, no money coming in except my small Austrian salary. I used to come home in the winter and wrap myself in a rug, because as I was in the office all day I couldn’t keep the stove running in the flat – not a very rosy existence.

During Max’s stay in hospital I sold the Morris Minor to one of the girls on the fourth floor of the Embassy where they had their spies pretending they were other people. The MI5 man would interview prospective spies and people collecting information. I sold the car to her with difficulty for 150 Pounds and she refused to pay me the money because she said it wasn’t worth it, it was only worth 50 Pounds. Because I was only locally engaged she thought she could get away with it. I was so furious and I couldn’t do anything about it because I wasn’t supposed to know who her boss was. So I went around telling people in the office what had happened and eventually Mr Daw heard about it. He said he would speak to her boss and eventually I received the money. The only redress you’ve got is to talk about it in a loud voice till it eventually goes back to the person you want it to. Many years later I saw her again at the Dutch Embassy’s party. She didn’t recognise me thank goodness. After Max came out of hospital we bought a DKW (Deutsche Kraftwagen) made by the Volkswagen firm. It was a car that ran on 50% petrol, 50% oil, like a motorbike and was the only car that could be adapted for disabled people – Max’s right leg was completely stiff. It was half automatic, he didn’t have to use his right foot, he used the break and accelerator with his left leg. There was no clutch and it had a two-stroke engine. When Richard saw the car he said it was just like the Lagos taxis. Max was greatly insulted, his beautiful car! There was a little rhyme they used to say: “Der DKW fährt Berg auf, und fährt Berg runter”.[3] Stephanie learnt to drive on it, she only sold it as an old-timer about three years ago. It was still going strong, though the inside was a bit dilapidated.

After two years in hospital the Austrian insurance refused to pay the fees for Max at the Arbeiterunfall any longer. I asked the Embassy Legal Advisor to write a letter to the Arbeiterunfall, to Professor Boehler, explaining the situation. They were very decent and said they wouldn’t charge anything for treatment, a great relief and some compensation for all the other horrible happenings previously. Professor Boehler was a wonderful person, his doctors were excellent and all his patients loved him. He used to come into the room and examine each patient individually, whereas Professor Denk never came into the wards at all, only his assistant, Salem, who was Max’s undoing. Except for the osteomyelitis the treatment couldn’t have been better. The infection stayed with him till the end of his life, there was always this poison in his system, which affected his heart, and smoking affected his lungs and caused emphysema.

I was very romantic in those days; Austria had a very romantic flair for me. I loved the mountains and felt quite invigorated exploring them on walking expeditions. In Australia it was the sea I loved, in Austria it was the mountains. Max was a very good companion to be with, he made friends easily and knew lots of places and people. We were very happy and had a good first year of marriage until the night of the accident, December 22, 1951

[1] Schaedelbasis Bruch: fracture of the base of the skull. Jochbogenbruch: break of the zygomatic arch.

[2] Translation: “She should try that in London”

[3] Translation: “The DKW drives uphill and downhill.”

Kommentar schreiben

11 April 2003

For the first time in ages I’m actually punctual. June already has the kettle on and some cake ready. Today I’ve bought a pastry from the bakery. I unwrap it, put it on a plate and place it in front of her on the heavy dining table in the lounge – the room that used to be Max’s office now serves as the dining room cum front parlour. The sweet is plump and juicy, a pastry base with a custard toping bearing in a fruit assortment, glistening with a thin covering of translucent jelly. June is enchanted. Where did I get it? Do they do many different types of these things? Do they make smaller ones? If she asked someone to buy one for her when she invites the young American couple currently renting Stephanie’s flat to tea, how many would she need to purchase? I cut it in half and she tucks in happily. I eat a piece of meals on wheels cake. She asks me if I want the other half, but I desist. She doesn’t insist and I know she will enjoy it tomorrow. This makes me realise again, that despite being in the midst of the action in the past, she hasn’t been out and about for a long time, and many simple things are beyond her knowledge now. Her problematic knees have prevented her seeing Vienna developing into a constantly more cosmopolitan city. And how can you ask someone to bring you something, unless you know it exists? I’m sitting in the Leopold Café as I write these memories, looking through the glass window at the snow blowing outside. A dog sits tied to the lamppost, eagerly waiting. Trying not to look too cold. June has never yet seen the new Musuem’s Quartier, the new space, the cafes, the museums created here. Sometimes I become frightened of old age, having an active mind but captured in an increasingly inactive body. Fortunately I’m still young and about to embark on one of life’s new phases – my rapidly approaching wedding on 3 May. I’m very much looking forward to it. June will come to the wedding ceremony in Christ Church, a friend will give her a lift; however, she’ll not stay for the celebration in the Lusthaus. I’m glad she’ll be there.

Kommentar schreiben

 
Once, when Max was home for two months, my mother came to help me and keep me company. My brother was working in Lagos, Nigeria, with the United Africa Company and was engaged to a BOAC stewardess. He saw her every now and again, whenever the plane landed, but she broke off the engagement. Richard was terribly upset, very unhappy and lonely in Lagos. He wrote recounting all this to my mother, who in turn told Max and me. Max always had brilliant ideas, he said, "I know what we'll do, we'll put an advertisement in the Kurier, 'Junger Engländer kommt auf Urlaub nach Wien, möchte nette Österreicherin kennen lernen. Chiffre: Urlaub in Österreich, Bitte mit Bild an uns schicken[1]". We did this then waited in anticipation for the replies to come. There were about seven or eight letters with photos, which we read and had a great laugh. We sent them on to my brother in Lagos, thinking it might cheer him up to write to some of these girls and take his mind off his broken engagement. He wrote to several of them. A very passionate correspondence arose between him and one of the Viennese girls, Sigrid, which eventuated in a proposal of marriage and engagement, all by letter. 

After two or three months we heard he was coming home on two months leave, in the summer, and he'd arranged to marry this girl, without ever having seen her and not knowing anything about her. My parents were quite shocked, we were all quite horrified. We thought it would be much better if he went to England first, had some leave there, then come to Austria, meet the girl and if everything worked out get married at the end of his leave and return to Nigeria. No, no, Sigrid didn't want that. Sigrid was a very sexy girl, according to the men anyhow. She looked slightly like Marilyn Monroe, blond hair, big smile. I didn't find her very pretty, but Max thought she was most attractive. She came and had tea with us once or twice. Told us a bit of her history – she had married at the age of 18 and was divorced. I think she was now about 24 or 25. Her father was a Sectionschef in some Ministry; her mother a piano teacher. Her parents were also divorced. She was working with BEA, not as a hostess, but in the office. She used to tell us how clever she was by turning off all the heating during the night in winter in all the other offices except hers, so hers would be nice and warm when she arrived in the morning! She and her mother always used to go shopping at the Russian shop, the U.S.I.A., on the outskirts of Vienna in the Russian zone. That was the thing decent people did not do, go and shop at the U.S.I.A. and support the Communists!

Their passionate correspondence continued and Richard arranged to come straight to Vienna, so the wedding had to be organised before he arrived. Sigrid arranged it for ten days after his arrival. Then they would go on a honeymoon, followed by a trip to England and finally back to Nigeria. I don't know how she managed it, but she did. Richard arrived by train, flying to Germany. Sigrid sent her parents away for two days, they weren't allowed to stay in their flat in Nordbergstrasse. She went to the station on her own to meet him, nobody else was allowed to see him. Richard spent two days alone with Sigrid, in order to get to know her, or in bed with her, probably, as Max said. Then the parents were allowed to return to their flat, and the wedding preparations were finalised. The wedding took place in the Evangelical Church in the Dorotheagasse. Richard and I were detailed to collect the bouquet from a florist on the Ring, a very expensive flower shop. Sigrid and her mother and father, brother and one or two of her friends were waiting at the Church. Richard was driving our little Morris Minor – we lent them our little Morris Minor so they could drive around and use it for their honeymoon. When we arrived at the church Sigrid had a fit of hysterics, it was the wrong bouquet. So back to the shop for the right one – they’d been mixed up. Then the wedding service could begin followed by a modest reception in our flat, as Max couldn't go anywhere at that stage, where several of our friends were also invited. The bridal couple drove off on their honeymoon in our little car for about ten days, then travelled to England to stay with my parents for a short while before returning to Lagos. One thing I will never forget, Max couldn't walk, or only with crutches, and couldn't go outside at all.  I asked Richard if he could take Max for a drive round town in our car, so he could see what was going on, he hadn't been out of the place since the end of 1951 and this was now 1954.  “No, we have no time.” This was just typical behaviour – they were both very self-centred and my brother was completely in Sigrid’s control. She didn't get on with our parents and was an impossible person as far as I was concerned. Sigrid’s family had a flat in Baden where she and Richard used to stay during their holidays, but I never saw them. They had three children, born one after the other. The one born last, Vanessa, is my godchild; she's a nice girl. She is married to an American and has two children, a little boy and a little girl and lives in Virginia. Sigrid divorced my brother after the children had left school and married again – a Catholic priest, Charles, a lecturer at London University. Richard had lost his job in Lagos because Sigrid was always demanding he should ask for a salary rise, which he did till eventually the firm had enough and sacked him. They moved back to England where Richard took a job in Plymouth, which didn't suit Sigrid. She spent most of her time working in London, going down at the weekends occasionally to do the washing – before moving to Hyde Heath near Amersham and their divorce.

When Sigrid married Charles, Richard had to move out and sell the jointly owned house and found a minute one up-one-down kind of workman's cottage not far away. Sigrid and Charles later bought a country village post office on an island off the West Coast of Scotland advertised in the Times – the island where George Orwell wrote his novel '1984'. This venture was, however, unsuccessful. The shop, also the local post office, made a great loss. Owing to these financial difficulties they were forced to sell up and eventually moved to Austria where her brother is an architect. They bought a house in Seeboden on the Muellstaetter See, in Carinthia, where she and Charles now still live. There were some terrible happenings, such as when my father died in May 1968, at the age of 90. He and my mother were living in Plymouth with Richard and Sigrid. They had previously moved from Crawley Down to a cottage in Long Milford, Suffolk, which was bought for them by Max and my New Zealand Uncle Barclay, Mummy’s brother. They had each contributed half of the cost, 500 Pounds each. Uncle Barclay’s contribution was to be his gift to me in his will when he died. My parents loved their little cottage and my father did wonders in the small garden. That must have been in 1963-4, I visited them a number of times with Stephanie. About two years later my mother had several falls and my father caught bronchitis. It was Sigrid’s idea that Uncle Barclay should finance an extension to their house in Plymouth for my parents to move there. In spite of my protests this was done and the house in Long Milford sold – which should have been my property, but the deeds were unfortunately in my father’s name and I could not prevent it. So they moved in October 1967, and my father died in May 1968. In this way I was done out of my inheritance. My mother wasn't allowed to ring me to say my father had died until a fortnight later, so I didn't know anything till after the cremation, after his ashes had been scattered in the sea. It was a great shock to read the news in her letter. I spoke to Richard about it recently, he said, "oh yes, but she was my wife, and we have to be loyal to my wife". He's happily married again now, to another Viennese Austrian, who is kind and sensible. Karin, Richard’s second wife, went to England when she was 19 as an “au pair” and married an Englishman. Her husband up and left her with three small children to bring up. She worked as an accountant and kept the family going. Then she met Richard at a “Single’s Club”, and now they're all quite happy. She's a great manager as well, all Richard's women seem to be great managers of their husbands. Thank goodness, we've got back to normal relations once more.

After my father died, my brother and Sigrid were very anxious to see the last of my mother, so I suggested she could come and stay with us for the winter of 1968. We found her a room in the Wattmanngasse, the street round the corner from the Tirolergasse, where she could make her own breakfast and then come up and spend the day, have lunch and supper with us. We took her home in the evening about ten o’clock, either Max or I would walk with her. One evening Max was walking with her and our cat who used to go along as well. The cat we had in those days, Minkie, used to run along inside the hedges, inside the fences of all the houses along the Wattmanngasse. They reached my mother’s house and said goodnight. There was a little Gasthaus down in the Trautmannsdorfgasse, which now no longer exists, where Max used to go for a glass of wine. So Max thought he would take this opportunity and enjoy a drink before going home again. The cat was still there of course. Max crossed the road to the Gasthaus, stepped up to open the door, at which minute the cat set up a terrible yowling and wailing, it sounded just like a baby being murdered. The door was open, the people inside were thinking, ‘what’s that terrible row going on outside?’ They saw Max, though they didn’t see the cat, they just heard this noise. Max quickly shut the door, retired and docilely went home with the cat. He said that’s the first and only time he’s been stopped by entering a Gasthaus by a cat. Minkie obviously didn’t think it was a good idea Max going into the Gasthaus and she be left outside, so he had to come home like a good boy. I think that’s a lovely story, the one and only time he’s been stopped from entering a Gasthaus by a cat!

I made my peace with Sigrid after my last knee operation at the AKH in January 1999. I was sent down to the new rehabilitation hospital in Grimmenstein (the old one was like being in a prison). I was there for three weeks, I was there for my birthday, lying in bed and learning to walk again with crutches, still in plaster. Stephanie wasn’t coming to see me till Monday and on Saturday afternoon I was having my afternoon snooze when the door opened and Vanessa and a little boy suddenly appeared. I couldn’t believe my eyes. She was on holiday from America staying with her mother and she always remembers my birthday. She had persuaded Sigrid and Charles to drive all the way from the Müllstätter See, about five hours, to come and see me. She found a wheelchair and pushed me down to the coffee house. They stayed for about one hour. I was quite flabbergasted and very touched, it was like a miracle happening. They helped me back into bed, Sigrid and Vanessa lifted me. She was so gentle, totally different. I was so touched I cried. That’s when I made my peace with Sigrid. They then drove back home in a snowstorm and couldn’t find their way, so didn’t arrive home till midnight. I called up the next day to say thank you. It’s no good harbouring these memories or being annoyed any longer. That was a really loving gesture.

[1] Translation: “Young British man holidaying in Vienna seeks to meet pretty Austrian girl. Ref.: Holiday in Austria, please send a photo.”

Kommentar schreiben

14 April 2003

I’m sitting in a café garden waiting for Eva Brenner of Project Theater Studio, an experimental theatre in Vienna, very cutting edge, working with Lee Breuer in New York, and currently also being inspired by Eastern European performance. I translate texts for their English homepage, plays and so on. It’s wonderful, like opening a door to a world I didn’t even know was out there. Eva will be late, I just called her, but I’m happy sitting in the sun, enjoying a cup of coffee. Behind me a multinational table discusses Austria in accentuated German, an Eastern European language – I can’t identify it and a clear German. “In Frankreich war es immer so…”, says someone with a French accent, an American answers. A suitable setting for a meeting with a transatlantic experimental theatre specialist. I plan to start checking my translation so far, but I find writing to you easier. It’s a difficult text, I’ve been fighting with it for several days now, I can only cope with short blasts at a time. Chatting about it with June the other day we enter a discussion on the difficulty of making translated text sound like “real” English as opposed to translated text. I fear I will fail somewhat as so much of this experimental theatre theory is unknown territory to me. My extent of theatre knowledge so far has been a limited exposure to Derek Jacoby in Shakespearean guise.

I feel like I am living on several different planets at present, my wedding preparation planet seems to be revolving fastest, making my head spin. June’s planet continues its gentle whirl, an occasional hiccup: “well, it’s YOUR book”, “people will think I’m a very miserable old woman”. I don’t think so; they will come to know an extraordinary lady with a fascinating life story. The Project Theater planet is as yet generally unchartered territory; I discover new experiences over every horizon. My next hat life is still out of sight on a far horizon. The Women’s Career Network seems to spin exceedingly fast once or twice a month when so much needs to be done, and my own business is fortunately still a star in the blue yonder – albeit a strongly glowing one.

Kommentar schreiben

I was going to tell you about some of the holidays I had with my friend Evelyn when Max was in hospital, or at home, and couldn’t do very much. Evelyn was always very keen on seeing new places and we were both keen on climbing mountains. The first holiday we went on together was down to Italy, to Gabicce Mare, a lovely seaside resort on the Adriatic coast, very sought after in those days. Nothing very exciting happened there and Max was well looked after in hospital. That must have been in 1954. A Dolomite holiday Evelyn and I enjoyed was in 1955 at the Misurina Lake and the following year, ’56, Max joined us. On this day we walked up to the Violette Hütte and had to cross a very craggy part of the mountain, where patches of snow still lingered. I slipped and dislocated my knee. There was I, in the midst of this patch of snow, pushing my knee back into place, then limping on till we reached the Violette Hütte. They gave us some kind of a bandage to wrap my knee up with, then we had to walk all the way back down the mountainside, back to the hotel, which wasn’t very good for my knee. After my knee recovered slightly – in those days it recovered fairly quickly – we walked across the Schlern to Kastelruth. That was a very long trek and very high up, and didn’t agree with my circulation. I kept on getting no breath, feeling faint, having to stop and wait, then taking a few more steps along. Poor Evelyn, she thought I was never going to make it to the top, or never going to get across this huge vast kind of Alm. I felt sick, but in the end we made it to Kastelruth and there I felt better. I recovered after a good night’s sleep and we came down again to Klausen, where we met Max and his brother Louis and his wife, who had arrived from Germany.  Another time we holidayed in the Dolomites when Max was better and could walk with crutches. We met Evelyn in Pieve di Livinallongo, where we stayed for a week. Max took a taxi, a little folding stool, his paints, a bottle of red wine and a bottle of water and did his watercolours while Evelyn and I went up the mountainside once again. There we found old helmets, old German helmets, from the First World War. There had been a great battle up this hillside, above the place where we were staying. There were no great mishaps there thank goodness. Down below in the valley there was a lake where Evelyn and I bathed. She was very hardened from bathing up in Scotland, where the water is very, very cold. She went in, I didn’t go in, and Max stood on the edge and laughed at both of us.

We travelled down to St. Ulrich, famous for its wood-carvers, and stayed there for a week. Evelyn and I again went walking, Max did a bit of painting and chatted to the people round about. He couldn’t go very far, his leg was stiff and he walked with a stick. One day we persuaded Evelyn to go on a rock-climbing tour with a proper guide, ropes and all the equipment! She was very nervous about doing so, but after a sleepless night made up her mind and went off early in the morning with the guide and later came back in one piece! She said coming down the rock face was worse than going up. We shared our dinner table at the hotel with an Italian family. Whenever we came down to sit at the table in the evening (we weren’t there at lunchtime), the whole family stood up and bowed to us, then sat down again! So we had to bow back to them. Why they thought that we had to be bowed to I wouldn’t know, but it was so funny! The father and mother and the children they all stood up and bowed, and then sat down once more. Rather like the Chinese or the Japanese. It was the highlight of our stay at St. Ulrich!

The last holiday I took with Evelyn must have been in the year 1957; I was going to meet Max afterwards in England. Evelyn and I went down to Monte Rosso on the Ligurian coast, she arrived from Paris and I from Vienna. I managed to get there, even changing trains with the help of my non-existent Italian. There was no traffic there, no cars, one could only get there by train. It was very quiet and very beautiful with big oleander along the promenade. Evelyn had booked rooms for us in a private house, which was very peculiar. We had a big bedroom at the back of the house that was all very nice. But the snag was that the owners were always giving bridge parties. Whenever we went to bed we had to walk through their drawing room where they were playing bridge. It was rather awkward. Evelyn decided this wasn’t a good thing at all, so we moved out into a proper little hotel, which was much better, though it was very, very smelly. We had a great adventure on this holiday. One day we were lying on the beach enjoying the sunshine, with all our clothes, our bathing things and our handbags with all our money and passports etc. as one mustn’t leave anything lying about. A man came up and said, “would you like to go out for a boat ride?” There was a small steam yacht lying off the beach. We thought it wasn’t going to take very long, so we said, “yes, thank you.” We didn’t ask him in our non-existent Italian about the length of the journey. We boarded the boat thinking we’d be back in half an hour and left our things lying there on the beach, passports, money, bags everything because of this. The boat went out to sea, turned in the other direction, then went right down the coast. It was a whole day’s outing, which we knew nothing about. It stopped at a big port right down the coast, it took us about one and a half hours to get there. We were quite frantic, “we can’t do this, we must go back!” “Oh no, you can’t do that, you must stay on the boat now!” We were in a quandary, how could we get back to Monte Rosso? If we go on the train – but we only had our bathing things on, we didn’t have any clothes, we had no money either! One of the sailors lent us a shirt, I think I put on the shirt, and another one lent us a pair of trousers. Evelyn put those on. These enabled us to go ashore. We couldn’t remain on the boat, we had to go ashore, till the boat started the return journey in two hours time. We had nothing to eat, so we sat on the side of the harbour wharf somewhere, me covered up in the shirt, Evelyn with the trousers. People looked at us askance and made remarks about our appearance – though in Italian fortunately, so we didn’t really understand. We couldn’t help it! We thought we can’t go on the train, we had no money, then we would look even more suspicious! So we had to wait there until the boat went back again. On the return journey the sea became very rough and I felt very sick, it was terrible lying on deck and trying not to vomit. Eventually we reached our beach again, about four o’clock in the afternoon. We thought everything would have been stolen – but just imagine – there were our things, all still lying there safe and sound. They hadn’t been touched. Our handbags, our passports, our money, everything. It was still all there, quite intact. We were very lucky. In those days people were honest and not stealing everything from everyone. It was during this holiday Evelyn taught me how to eat spaghetti. I didn’t like spaghetti, it all got tangled up, and I wanted to cut it. “Oh no, you mustn’t cut spaghetti, you must put your fork in the middle and twist it. Then put it into your mouth and bite it off if any hangs out.” It was there I also tasted pizza for the first time.                                                                                                

I visited the Funckes in Hagen again after the war. During my first visit in 1936 they were of course very imbued with the National Socialist policy – very much against Churchill, whom they regarded more or less in the same way as we regarded Hitler. So on the whole we avoided politics, though I felt obliged to say “Heil Hitler” to the postman, however without raising my hand, as I didn’t want to cause the family any trouble in that respect. After the war my parents were very good, they knew how the situation in Germany was, down to bricks and rubble and very little food. They regularly sent Christel and her family food parcels via the Red Cross. Christel and her family were so very grateful they contacted my mother and Christel even came to England and visited my parents, so there was always this close contact. The first time I went back after the war I stayed with Christel and her mother, on a return journey from England to Vienna, probably after Max had had his accident and was still in hospital. The original house had been bombed and two blocks of flats built on the grounds. Christel and her mother now lived in two separate flats in this very nice new modern building. I saw some of the family who were still alive. They were all good Nazis before the war, but Christel and her mother changed their attitude completely afterwards, having found out what went on behind the scenes. They didn’t know anything about the concentration camps, I didn’t know about them either at that time. When they found out after the war it was a terrible shock to them. Jochen was killed in Russia, Paul was so shortsighted he couldn’t be called up, and neither was Christel who also had very bad eyesight. They were very pleased to see me and I again met people I had known before the war who were still there. It was nice getting in contact again with Christel and we became good friends again.

One holiday after Max had recovered, my mother, Max and I went down to Cowsand, our favourite spot in Cornwall down near Plymouth. It was terribly hot, and humid – Max could hardly breathe; it was very bad for his lungs. He couldn’t sleep; he had to sleep sitting up in Cowsand. Seasides weren’t a good spot for Max, neither was the English climate at that moment. On the way back we stayed in London at the Royal Court Hotel and he wanted a glass of beer. He was served beer that hadn’t been cooled, which he didn’t approve of at all. From there we crossed the Channel by boat, and took the train to Hagen to stay with Christel and her mother. He was so glad to arrive there, a country where they spoke his language, served cold beer and away from the humid damp climate which caused him a great deal of uncomfortable nights. It was a great relief to arrive in Hagen. The weather was good, the beer was cold and he liked the Funckes. That was the second time I saw Christel again after the war and we visited her a number of times before she died five or six years ago. Her elder brother was the only one who married. They had three children and Christel always complained about the upbringing of the children. Later on, after Max had died, her brother Paul and his wife came on holiday to Vienna and I met her. She’s very nice indeed and I’m still in touch with her today.

Kommentar schreiben

24 April 2003

I almost feel like starting “Dear Diary” as you’ve mutated into something very close to me. June called this morning to check that we arrived back from Switzerland in one piece – one of our usual madcap expeditions. It consisted of a quick van rental, drive to Switzerland on Saturday, enjoy a peaceful Easter Sunday with Michael’s mother and her partner, eat copiously on invitation of loving family members, and drive back to Vienna loaded with the remains of my paternal grandmother’s furniture.

June and I enjoy our little chat, she asks about our wedding preparations – thankfully they are finally drawing to a close. We agree that I’ll visit her next Tuesday afternoon. I’m already looking forward to it. An oasis of calm amidst the waves of toil. Drinking tea and laughing. Last time she insisted readers may find her a very miserable character, it’s far from the truth.

Afterwards I cycle to the soap factory, the last of its kind still manufacturing cold-stirred handmade coconut oil soap with natural aromas. A lovely couple, brother and sister, own it. They are delighted I’m giving their soaps to my friends at the Bridal Shower on Saturday. They wish me well; give me free samples “for my honeymoon”. Herr Weiss even fixes my bike – the saddle was too low. I wish I could say I’ll take the company on when they retire (they’re around 70 now). They have no one interested in continuing their inheritance and this saddens me immensely. They are so happy I love their soaps, are so proud of their handiwork – their life’s work. The best I can do for them is purchase their products, promote them to friends, wish them well. A quick cycle home on my newly raised saddle and a short trip to the supermarket. “Billa” is always slightly disappointing in its selection of products, the isles are narrow and the atmosphere somewhat cramped. I think wistfully of supermarkets in England. There are some things one never stops missing while one enjoys the advantages of where one is. Above the tills hang signs proclaiming Billa will open more tills if the queues are over six people in length. I stand, one in a string of ten and wait patiently. The bread is excellent, so is the new deli bar and it’s too temptingly close to home to go elsewhere. Back at home I start baking cookies for the wedding reception (instead of the more usual sugared almonds). We wanted to have a fun wedding, a casual occasion, but somehow it’s grown, changed in our hands and become a complex game of “to do” lists. We’re reaching the point when we’ll both be glad the preparation phase is over, and the “marketing materials” as Michael calls them are finally completed.

Alex, my Maid of Honour/Best Woman, and I enjoy an afternoon chatting, shopping, relaxing. We aim to try on wedding dresses. Of course mine is ready, painstakingly, lovingly sewn by Michael’s mother according to my design. It’s truly lovely, but nothing like the ones I try on. They have boned bodices, voluminous skirts, some beautiful white silk, some glaringly white synthetic. I’m immensely relieved afterwards that I knew exactly what I wanted and could have it made. It would have been such a difficult decision. White, cream, silk, satin, lace dreams. “Princess dresses”. Beautiful, but one very much like the other. Ill affordable. The sales women brisk, business like, zip me in and out. I must stand on a small raised platform in front of a full-length mirror. Alex watches, takes photos. I say I’m getting married on 3 September.  Today is my first time trying on wedding dresses. Well, it’s almost true. In some dresses I look many years older, in some ten years younger. Stern and distant or elegant and ladylike. But in none do I feel really “me”. We have fun and leave to enjoy coffee and cake on Kärntner Strasse. While there we see a beautiful wedding cake in Konditorei Gerstner’s window. The bridal couple on top perfect in style and kitsch. They make stunning cakes, but I’ve already asked Dr Raftl from the Lusthaus to make our cake; hopefully I can request the design to be something similar. We leave thoroughly pleased with ourselves, Vienna, the afternoon, and our happy in our friendship.

Kommentar schreiben

18 May 2018

June talked about her holidays - well something funny happened to me last week. I was kindly invited to join my good friend Jacqui - we've known each other since primary school - and her husband in Venice the other week. After a rather exhausting first quarter I was delighted at the prospect of a "time out". This year has involved a complete re-design of the shop into a gallery, an art exhibition with my mother, taking part in a group show in Lausanne, and trying to return most of the goods I had on loan. Not to mention the mundane, every-day kind of things - the kid's dental work, the household chores, the B&B, and trying to think up new artistic endeavors which should make some money at some point. I said I'd pay our interior architect with a family portrait - and I'm very relieved to find I could actually do it and am delighted with the outcome! Anyway, here I was off to Venice, city of dreams. And it appears - weddings - if you go to San Marco early in the morning you'll most likely bump into a plethora of brides, some with a swarm of helpers from make-up to lighting, all having that special wedding photo taken. I'm not quite sure why you would take this somewhat stressful option of going on your honeymoon or the like, just to have some "amazing" wedding photography. Will your life ever live up to the photo afterwards I wonder? 

Anyway, I also got myself out of bed and over to the special square early in the morning, accompanied by my trusty easel, paints and paper. Setting up to paint a view of the square I noticed an English film/TV crew setting up next to me. It appeared they were there to film a British/Italian TV personality - Gino D'Acampo - who would get mobbed by the British tourists if he turned up any later. I had to admit, I lived in Switzerland, and had never heard of him. Oh dear. Anyway, he turned up and while he was talking, explaining what he was going to say and so on, I painted a quick sketch of him. Noticing what I'd done, they asked if they could film me painting him. I was wired with a microphone, had to sign my life over to ITV, Gino signed the picture too, and it was then bought to be sold for charity! Somehow, I was still probably slightly asleep, very bemused and not quite sure if it had all happened, it now appears I might probably appear on British TV in October, in Gino's program about cooking and eating in Venice! I do hope they let me know when it will be aired - and they haven't cut me out. I had no make-up on, was wearing my much stained painting apron... ah well, at least very authentic!

Kommentar schreiben

 
After our holiday in Monte Rosso in 1957, Evelyn returned to Paris, I travelled on to England, by train and boat and stayed with my parents at Crawley Down and met Max there. Then we returned to Vienna, where I discovered I was pregnant, a great surprise. I was feeling very queasy the whole time, I thought it was just the seasickness in the boat, but it wasn’t just that, it was something else. That was a great excitement, though it was a bit awkward at the beginning. During my pregnancy I was still working in the Commercial Section of the British Embassy, where I had returned after the Treaty was signed.

For the State Treaty negotiations the Foreign Ministers from England, America, France and Russia came to Vienna regularly to have discussions to try and get this Treaty on its way. These discussions were held at the Allied Secretarial Building on the Schwarzenberg Platz, now the Industriellen Vereinigung, as I’ve previously mentioned. There were many consultations, many meetings, nobody thought the Treaty would ever get signed, but miracles sometimes happen, the same as when we won the court case after Max’s accident. Finally the end the Treaty was signed in May 1955, in the Belvedere. On that fateful day, I went along and stood amongst the crowd in the garden below the balcony. I was determined to see what happened. The chestnuts were out, the hedges green – a beautiful May day. At long last all the Foreign Ministers and their secretaries came out on the balcony, in the front the Austrian Chancellor Figl waving a sheet of paper with the signatures all attached, stating that all foreign troops would withdraw from Austria by the end of October of that year. That was when he made his famous declaration after 10 years of occupation by the Allies: “Österreich ist frei”. Everybody cheered and clapped, it was a great occasion. The barracks at the top of the hill here in Hietzing, which had been occupied by the British Forces, were cleared. No more British trucks, no more British soldiers, no more American jeeps, no more “Four in the Jeep” driving round Schönbrunn. Now we have a tourist train going through Schönbrunn Park to take people round, in those days we had the notorious “Four in the Jeep”.

I left the Consulate and was allowed to go back to the Embassy. There were no longer any Russians in the neighbourhood except in the Russian Embassy opposite in the Reisnerstrasse, but it wasn’t so dangerous. After the Russians left Security was relaxed and the Embassy was allowed to take on locally engaged staff once more. I received my promotion and regained my old office in the Commercial Secretariat, still under the Commercial Counsellor, “Daddy” Daw, who remained there until he retired, three or four years later. So I was at the Embassy when I became pregnant, which was a good thing. I thought now I’m on the Austrian social insurance system and that will be a help. I returned to the Embassy in October 1956 and I became pregnant in 1957 and Stephanie was born in March 1958. I used to lie on the floor at lunchtimes if I was tired because they had no couch anywhere. One of secretaries, I think it was the first secretary, saw me lying thus at lunchtime one day and said, “oh this won’t do at all”, so they had a couch put in one of the rooms downstairs, and I could lie down there. Then when Stephanie was born the Foreign Office kindly agreed to let me work part time, so I only had to work in the mornings. It was a great gift on their part, because normally they didn’t do such things. In my case they were very kind, I only had half-pay of course. The other Austrian girls weren’t very pleased, they didn’t see why I should go home at lunchtime, and they have to stay the whole day in spite of my receiving less pay. Later when Stephanie was 14 or 15 I worked three whole days and had two afternoons off. They didn’t like that either, they were all very jealous, the Viennese girls in the office. The only English people we had were the secretaries, the male secretaries, the Commercial Counsellor, first, second and third secretary. All the rest were locally engaged Austrian girls or men, the girls were all very cliquey, it wasn’t easy.

Stephanie was born on the 18 March 1958 at the Rudolphiner Haus. My parents were both here, my father and my mother came by train. It was a very cold and wintery March with lots of snow. I thought the time had come and a friend of mine took me to the hospital, I was there for a night and a day, but nothing happened, so they sent me home again. I had this feeling, ‘well it’s all make believe, I’m not having a baby at all’. I felt my child is a fairy tale that will never eventuate. Then about two days later the proper pains started and my friend, who was a nurse, an Australian working at the Embassy, took me to the hospital once more. Stephanie arrived at 9.30 in the evening of the 18 March. My husband and his good friends, Inge and Freddy Srp, (Freddy was a cameraman, working with the man who made the Sissi films), were great frequenters of the Eden Bar in those days. The first night Max thought I was having the baby he went out and celebrated with them in the Eden Bar. Then no baby arrived and I was sent home again, so that was rather a disappointment. After I was brought to hospital the second time and the baby actually did arrive, they spent the night celebrating at the Eden Bar once more!

Stephanie, when she was born, looked just like a caricature of her father! It was quite extraordinary. Then of course she changed straight away, but in that first moment I saw her, I saw a little wizened Max. It was quite amazing. By this time my father had gone home, it was too cold, the snow was too much for him. Mummy stayed on, she was here for the christening. Stephanie was christened at Christ Church, our English Church in the Jaurèsgasse. Max’s brother Louis and his wife Traudel and her mother came from Lörrach in Germany, where they were living by this time. I had six weeks off work, at that time one was allowed six weeks off work before and after the birth. However, I still wasn’t feeling very fit six weeks later, so I had some kind of sick leave after my maternity leave. Then the Office said, “if you don’t come back to work in the next month, you’ll lose your job.” So of course I had to go back, in spite of not feeling at all well, but I managed in the mornings. We had a very good woman, Frau Weidinger, who loved Stephanie and looked after her very well. But it was rather heartbreaking for me, having to leave her every morning. She used to hold the baby up to the window, and I used to walk and catch the bus and spend the mornings in the office. It was rather upsetting, but I had her in the afternoon. We had a big black English pram one of the English families had given me, as they no longer needed it. It was one of those huge high prams, like a little baby carriage. Here they only had very low little basket-like looking prams, very close to the ground. The English ones were big high ones on springs. I used to take her for walks in Schönbrunn, everybody used to look at the pram and think, ‘oh dear, who is this coming along?’ They’d never seen a pram like that in their lives before.

When Stephanie was six months old my Uncle Barclay from New Zealand came to Vienna, as did my Australian second cousin, Keva. She came just after Stephanie was born and stayed here with us and helped look after her and helped Max look after her when I was at the office. Uncle Barclay drove here in his big Rover car and suggested, “we should all go to Munich”. We left Stephanie behind, at six months old – I was weaning her by then so she had bottles and Frau Weidlinger was very good. We drove to Munich for a week, the one and only time I visited Munich. It was very interesting and exciting. When we came back we were met by one of the inmates of this house, they were all a very odd kind of people. One woman rushed up to me and said, “oh do you know what’s happened, a terrible thing’s happened! Your child fell out of the pram while you were away! You housekeeper didn’t look after her properly”. I said “oh well”, I wasn’t going to be told off by this interfering woman, so I asked Frau Weidinger what had happened. Stephanie had tried to stand up, I don’t know how she managed it, she fell over the edge, she probably wasn’t properly strapped in. I said, “did you take her to the doctor?” No she hadn’t done anything like that, but by this time it was pointless to do anything, so we hoped Stephanie was all right. There were no signs of any damage. Later on, when she was walking, I used to take her into Schönbrunn, take her shoes and socks off, so she could walk on the pebbles. I thought it was good for her little feet when she was first walking. The Viennese used to say, “poor child, that’s a terrible mother, making her child walk with no shoes on, on this horrible pebbly path!” There were no asphalt paths in those days in Schoennbrunn that came a few years later. I thought it was very good exercise and even met another woman who agreed with me. She took the socks and shoes off her little boy, and the two children walked the pebbly paths together. I kept in touch with her from then on. Most of the Viennese thought I was very peculiar. I dressed Stephanie, instead of in Strumpfhose, in socks or long socks as one does in England and only in tights when it was very cold in the middle of winter. They looked at her, “poor child, she’s not wearing Strumpfhose, she’s only got long socks on!” Well they were long socks up to her knees and she had warm underthings on. The Viennese didn’t think much of the clothing and the way I was bringing up my child and I had many arguments on that subject.

When Stephanie was two I acquired my garden up on the Königelberg, which I was very thankful and happy to have. She was exactly two, so I’ve had that garden now for 42 years. I still have the garden and the huge cherry tree and three pear trees are still there. At the beginning I had a nectarine tree, which was quite extraordinary, a peach tree, which was lovely, a big apricot and a big cherry tree. I had apples and plums, I used to pick the plums and sell them to the shop down in Hietzing. Big dark coloured ones. We had a sandpit for Stephanie and her little friend. I used to collect her from the Kindergarten where she went everyday from the age of three. Frau Weidinger had left by then, and Frau Steinbach came. She was round and tubby and came every day to look after my husband and cook his lunch, because I was at the office until lunchtime. Then I used to come home, collect Stephanie from Kindergarten and take her up to the garden or go for a 20-minute walk through the woods with her. She and her friend Andrea didn’t like going up to the garden much, because they had to go nearly every afternoon. I collected her after she’d had her sleep and her tea. If they’d been good, I took them to the Konsum shop up there and they could have something called a Lutscher, a lolly. One day they hadn’t been good and I refused them their treat, making them very annoyed. I didn’t say anything till we got home, then I said, “Stephanie, what have you got there?” It turned out they’d stolen proper children’s dummies, the ones you put in a baby’s mouth! They’d taken them out of revenge. I was greatly annoyed, rang up Andrea’s mother, “do you know what these children have done?” “Oh” she said, “that doesn’t matter, don’t take any notice of that.” “No” I said, “that’s stealing, and they mustn’t be allowed to get away with that, they must be taught a lesson.” I rang up the shop and spoke to the manageress. She laughed about it too, I said, “its no laughing matter, these two children have stolen something, I’m bringing them back tomorrow with these dummies, and when I bring them in please be very strict with them and tell them they were very naughty to have done such a thing, and they will give the dummy back to you.” I marched them up to the shop and the poor manageress, she could hardly stop herself from laughing when these two children came in and handed her back the dummies. She wasn’t very strict with them at all, so I had to tell them off. She said, “yes, you mustn’t do that again”. That was the end of that story. That’s the one and only time I know Stephanie has stolen anything. As a reward after that I relented a little bit and bought them proper lollies, which made up for their ticking off.

Here is another story from the time when Stephanie was still very small and going to Kindergarten. One day she’d done something that I wasn’t pleased with and she wasn’t pleased with me, so she said, “I’m going”. She took her coat and marched out of the house and left, she ran away. I thought I’d wait a little while and then see where she’d gone. So I waited a little before walking along the Tirolergasse to the little park, the Gloriettepark, which used to be called the Beserlpark, and there was Stephanie sitting on a bench. She’d run away as far as the park. I sat down beside her and talked to her till she calmed down. We came home hand in hand. One day when she had a little tricycle, we were going along on the pavement. There was a policeman standing at the end of the Tirolergasse, because the house on the corner was the Chilean Embassy. The policeman said, “you’re not allowed to ride on the pavements, go down on the road!” I said, “with a small child, on a tricycle? I’m not going to make her ride on the road with the cars coming along”. Just imagine, in those days a small child was not allowed to ride its bicycle on the footpath. Today, people ride their bicycles on the footpath, nobody says a single word, they never ring their bells, they nearly knock you down. How things have changed, and how the Viennese have changed.

When I used to collect Stephanie from the Kindergarten after her sleep and her tea, she wouldn’t talk to me for a few minutes, she just ignored me, until she got used to me again. I don’t know why, don’t ask me, but I’ve heard that that happens, like cats, if you neglect them, they won’t talk to you after you come home, because you haven’t been there. Then she would start to talk. I always spoke to her in English, I thought that was the only way of getting her used to the language, but at the beginning she always used to answer me in German. Then she gradually gave me an answer in English, which improved as the time went on, when her ear became acclimatised. One day, she must have been in school by then, I was in England because my mother was ill. Stephanie remained in Vienna with Max and Frau Steinbach who did the cooking. She wrote me a letter, at least a postcard, on Max’s letter, in phonetic English. I’ve still got that card. She wrote, “most of the piple r nais to me” that was her first effort in writing English. It was sweet.

I must tell you one very odd incident that happened when Stephanie was about eleven or twelve and a pupil at the Wenzgasse school, where our Economic Division was quartered after the War. I worked there till the end of 1947 when it was closed down and the school took over again. Of course I never thought I was still going to be here and have a child who would go to the same school where I used to work. This day, Stephanie came home from school at lunchtime. She said, “do you know what happened today? An Englishman stopped me on the pavement and asked me where the Wenzgasse was. So I said, ‘it’s just round the corner, I’m going home now, the school has just closed down for the day’. He said, ‘that was where I worked after the war, I’d like to go and have a look at it again.’ Then he looked at me once more, and said in a surprised voice, ‘is your mother somebody called June Lamb?’ ‘Yes that’s my mother’ ‘Yes, I knew her when she was working in the Economic Division. I was in the Agriculture Branch, and she, that’s your mother, was in the Trade and Supply Branch’ “ Stephanie asked him what his name was, Major Berry, and where he was staying, and he told her. She came home and told me this story and I was quite surprised. We rang him at his hotel and he came and had dinner with us. We had a lot to talk about, the old days. Wasn’t it extraordinary, that he recognised me in Stephanie at the age of eleven or twelve? Stephanie finally got her own room when she was 13 – she slept in a bed we kept in our room during the day and pushed into the lounge every night till then. Max managed to obtain a room from the next-door flat and had the old door blocked up and a new one opened into our flat. By then she’d already acquired her taste for acting as she and a group of friends clubbed together and produced a play she wrote when she was 12. They even made their own scenery. They put it on here and all the parents came to watch. It was great fun.

Stephanie took her Matura in 1977, then she didn’t know what to do with her future life. It was my opinion that everybody could have a year off before they start studying, or until they make up their minds. My husband Max didn’t really agree, but he gave in and she went off on Eurorail to various places all by herself. The very first city she visited was Amsterdam – at that time well known for being the drug centre full of hippies, with her Rucksack on her back. Max was in a terrible state, what would happen to her, he thought he’d never see her again. She enjoyed Amsterdam, didn’t get caught up in the drug traffic in any way, then went over to Antwerp, England and Scotland all by herself. She visited my mother in her Home in Suffolk, staying with my friend Nan who had a cottage not far away. Then she came back again and went down to Spain and Portugal. She sent back two Americans she met in Portugal who turned up on our doorstep one day. “Stephanie said we could stay with you for a few days.” They were very nice, they slept in Stephanie’s room, one on the floor, one on the bed. That was the summer the pergola in my garden fell down, because some kind friend said she’d prune the grape vine growing over it when I was on holiday. This she did too thoroughly, pruning it at the bottom and the whole thing collapsed, the pergola on which the now top-heavy grape vine was growing, the whole thing came down. A new one was put up by the various men in the Garten Verein that had to be creasoted, and these two boys were a great help with the work. On returning home Stephanie couldn’t make up her mind what to do, she wouldn’t work in an office, she didn’t want to study chemistry as her uncle advised. She thought she’d do a course as a tour guide in Vienna, but she didn’t like that as she wasn’t the right type for manipulating groups of tourists. She had to learn a lot, which was very interesting from an historical point of view. Then after Max died, she decided she would study Social Anthropology. She was very interested in the esoteric, in the Shamans and such subjects. She decided to do her work on Voodoo dance in Haiti and its application to the entertainment stage. Thus she started on her university career and in the course of time was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and travelled to Haiti to carry out necessary fieldwork. A friend of hers knew a lady in New York who wanted someone to look after her plants while she was away for the summer. So Stephanie had a little job there, and from there she went on to Haiti. She was in Haiti twice, the very first time she went there was no communication, no telephone, nothing, it was all very worrying for me. She was in some Haitian’s hut; the floor was beaten earth with the chickens going in and out. She contacted the various Voodoo priests, and observed their dances, learnt all about the history and the meaning behind voodoo, which is not evil at all as people think, it’s a mixture of African and Christian beliefs. They have their gods, but it’s not magic, as many people believe. People dance themselves into a trance, Stephanie can probably tell you all about it. Her thesis on modern dance in connection with Voodoo dance, a huge tome, was finally completed and all exams passed, and she received her Ph.D. in 1985 at Vienna University. My friends and I were very pleased and proud of her achievement. Stephanie, however, was still very keen on going to America and acting in both film and on the stage. She managed to obtain a sponsored post as a teacher at a New York school, and thereby enabling her to apply for the Green Card, which at long last, in April 2003, was granted. This means permission to work and reside in the U.S. and travel in and out of the country.

Stephanie has now transferred her preference from dancing to acting. She seems to think there are more possibilities for actors in New York than in Vienna, where it’s a very closed circuit. It’s very, very difficult, although she did various things here before. She likes life in New York better than in Vienna, its more dynamic and invigorating there, she says she feels quite depressed and down in Vienna. The only way to have a visa for any length of time and so the possibility of obtaining a Green Card for the States is to have a sponsor. Friends told her about this lawyer who organises such things and he found this school, which takes in difficult children up to the age of twelve. They employ people to teach there who are willing to do it for no money, just for the visa, which runs for three years as you’re sponsored by this school. They also organise performances, small pantomimes, Peter Pan, Charlie Brown, whoever Charlie Brown might be, so it’s all vaguely in Stephanie’s line. I think she’s paid for staging and organising these performances and in this way she can stay in New York. She has also become a member of the film actor’s union, which is a good thing, it enables her to take on any roles if she’s offered one. She’s just been in a film, which has just been completed; her name is up in big letters at the beginning. Maybe something will come of that – we hope so! Now she has her own flat in New York, which she has just settled into. A bedroom, a sitting room, a little bathroom, a little kitchen, no furniture, a mattress on the floor. She said she slept very well the first night on her new mattress, put down with lots of plastic underneath, so it doesn’t get dirty. Now she must get some furniture. She also has a very nice flat in the seventh district in a Jugendstil house, in Vienna, which she lets out to the Burgtheater. They need flats for their guest actors who come for a certain length of time mostly from Germany. The flat is let intermittently to these actors, though the Burgtheater pays the bills.

I miss Stephanie, it would be much nicer if she could make a career for herself acting in Vienna. I don’t like it at all that she’s not here, but it can’t be helped. It would be lovely to have a daughter living nearby, married and with children, had a car and all those comfortable family things. But you can’t always have what you want. As she doesn’t seem to feel that’s her way in life, her way of life is acting in New York. I’m content to know that she’s happy in what she is doing. I don’t think it right that parents should influence children to the extent that they do what their parents wish them to do. I remember when I became engaged to Max in 1949, and we were going to get married in June ’50, but had to be postponed till September, my parents never made any complaint about me wanting to marry an Austrian, they could have said, five year’s after the war, “marrying an enemy!” They were very pleased I was doing what I wanted to do, nobody made any fusses. I chose to come here, in spite of little money, but that was my choice.

Kommentar schreiben

21 May 2003

On our honeymoon we meet an old man called Reiner from Bonn. He’s a chemistry and biology teacher and school director now enjoying his retirement, on holiday away from his wife. He says it’s important to give each other space and after 44 years together a holiday away gives him something to talk about at home. We meet him wandering around Loutro, talking to other holidaymakers, relaxing. He enjoys a beer after dinner in the bar and joins us there for after dinner drinks. He tells us of his life, his daughter married to an Italian opera singer with two little girls, his son, an aspiring “Oberarzt” in Berlin. How he met his wife and the unreliability of condoms in the early ‘60s. Not only were they a thick rubber and prone to cracking, but procuring them meant a visit to the chemists, where other shoppers avidly awaited your order and the opportunity to comment on your needs. It seemed better to marry than enjoy a long romance. After marriage happy times enjoying each other, travelling, five weeks spent discovering Greece. Comments from parents, “dear boy, do you have problems? Can I help you?” as the eagerly awaited grandchildren failed to appear. The great joy after five years and the production of a daughter. “Do not have children straight away. They are wonderful, but they change everything. Make sure you have a life with each other first, as we did”, was his advice to us. His lesson in birth control was that ‘male’ sperm swim faster than ‘female’ sperm, but they also die quicker too.

On our last night here he tells us of the war years. He was 14 in ’45 and during the war his school was deported to Bayern (from the Ruhr region) and continued there. A house was requisitioned and every morning a Nazi officer would arrive, they would sing a suitable laudatory song and then lessons began. Before this a system of close observation had been established, with controls carried out by Nazi staff – such as were your windows sufficiently blacked out – this excuse giving them the ability to enter your house, spy on you at home, check which radio station you were listening to. A system to keep everyone in their place. Afterwards his family managed to find each other again, Rainer and his brother (shot and wounded, but alive), his mother, his father. Their home was in ruins; his father had survived in the cellar. The region had been bombed daily; by day by the Americans, by night by the English. They start rebuilding their lives, scratching together everything they could find. As no glass was available windows were made of translucent paper tacked onto a wooden frame, the roof was corrugated metal, anything that could be found. Fuel was available in the form of wooden beams and suchlike from other bombed houses. Everyone survived on stealing, but it was called “organising” – you “organised” your fuel. This could include stopping trains of coal destined for the Allies by placing a car on the tracks, forcing the train to a halt and then grabbing as much coal off it as possible before the train could move on again. Food was scarce and consisted of delicacies such as dandelion salad, Rainer even built a trap for sparrows and remembers sitting at the kitchen table plucking them, their tiny bodies, “but they gave a quite decent soup”.

He remembers his first sight of freed concentration camp inmates, from Dachau, arriving. Thin, heaps of bones held together by their loose stripped clothing, dirty, huge eyes. They simply arrived off the train and grabbed everything they could. The town’s inhabitants were too horrified at the sight of them to do anything. Shocked into immobility.

We talk late into the night, but suddenly its time to go to bed. He’s had a long day walking along the coastline; we leave tomorrow morning on the ferry which sails right up almost onto the beach. A very strange sight, this large boat amongst the deckchairs! We’ve spent a wonderful week of our honeymoon in this quiet, sheltered village, with no cars, barely any “modern” distractions other than two computers in the internet café, not used – however much the temptation to see what’s going on in my ‘in box’. We both feel at peace after our wonderful wedding, several days strenuous walking, exploring gorges, Doric roads stretching into the distance, beautiful costal paths. We feel fit and having “earned” these last few days relaxation, beach sun and swimming. Tomorrow we travel to Rethymon to enjoy a day of town life, gradual acclimatisation in preparation of our journey home, back to Vienna and “real life”.

Kommentar schreiben

 9 July 2018

I've nearly finished, nearly all the photos are uploaded, there's nothing much more to say about my life so far, and the only thing left for me is to talk about June's garden. It was always very wonderful to visit June's garden. Sometimes she organised a driver from the Church to take her up the hill, sometime's I drove her up when I had a car, or sometimes we took a taxi. Either way it meant a thorough preparation - is the flask full of hot tea, is the biscuit tin loaded? We would then drive up together and she would ask me to pull out the occasional weed, or tell me about her various plants. Of course I couldn't resist painting her and her well-used thermos flask...

 

I remember my grandparents' allotment garden round the corner from our house. Totally built up now. But then I would hop into Groa's trailer, he would tie the dog, Senta, to it and rev up his little scooter and off we would go - walking would be minimally slower, but driving with Senta running besides us, her tongue lolling in the breeze was so much more fun. There he would dig up potatoes, throwing the small ones over his shoulder "no good, useless, too small". These days these little new potatoes are sold as delicacies, but for him a potato had to have some substance. 

My granny, Grosi, fed her whole family from produce grown in her garden and the allotment. I remember even when she couldn't hoe any more, agreeing to plant potatoes for her - it put me off planting them ever again! She kept telling me to hoe the ground finer, make sure they were evenly spaced and the bed was perfect! Now I have planted trees in the garden, and this summer my beloved dahlias are coming into full glory. 

Kommentar schreiben

I first met Dora to a closer extent in the train, where she seemed to become very attached to me, and wanted to snuggle up to me. I thought ‘this is very odd’, but she seemed a nice person, dumpy and little and very friendly. Then we discovered we were working in the office together. She was working in the interpreter’s division, also in the Commercial Section under Mr Daw who used to get very frustrated with her, and would tell her off, poor Dora. Herta managed to return from Berlin after the war and they even managed to get their flat back again, the one they’d had before in the Währinger Strasse. They set up their household once more, Dora and Herta. Dora was very clever at doing things, she could do anything. She was the man of the ménage. She could paint, she could fix things, she could cook, she could sew, she was quite extraordinary. After Max’s accident they were very kind to me, I used to go and have supper with them fairly often. They had a nice flat with a big balcony at the back which over looked a dancing school. Every Thursday was dance night, so we enjoyed free music from the live band. Herta and Dora were very devoted to each other. I had no idea in those days about lesbians and such things, but Max saw it straight away, “oh yes, Dora’s the man of the household and Herta’s the lady”. Herta was always very keen on beautiful clothes and makeup, she knew how one should treat one’s skin, pat one’s eyes and so on. They always used to go to Venice for holidays together, Herta would pack her things weeks beforehand whereas Dora just kind of pushed things in a suitcase at the last moment. In the end Mr Daw got fed up and Dora lost her job at the embassy, however she obtained a very good job in Wels as translator for a very big firm down there. This meant that Dora and Herta gave up their flat in Vienna and bought themselves a beautiful flat in Wels. Dora always worked, though Herta never did. I don’t know how she managed, but she never had a job. She had relatives in Berlin and during the capture of Berlin by the Russians when the Americans and the British used to fly food in, her niece sent her two small children to Vienna to have some decent holidays and food in Vienna as there was nothing much to be had in Berlin, it was still in a terrible state. When the Russians cut off all entry to Berlin these two children had to stay in Vienna, so they were here months on end until all this business in Berlin calmed down again. They were very kind, Herta and Dora.

Eventually, when they grew older and more frail Herta decided to go into a home. She thought it much better if she enter into the home first then she can settle down and when it was time for Dora to retire she could join her. So, in the end, Dora sold her lovely flat and moved into the home. They had separate rooms and when Herta died Dora was on her own. In the 1980’s I used to take the train down to Wels to visit Dora. I travelled down in the morning and returned in the evening. Dora would meet me at the station; we would have lunch at the station restaurant then go to her home for coffee, where she had a very nice room. Then have a little walk and enjoy some tea in the garden after which she would walk me back to the station. Then she grew weaker and weaker. Dora died just before her 90^th birthday, she was cremated and her remains were sent to Germany to be buried with Herta’s ashes. I learnt how to make doughnuts from Dora and we used to make Advent wreaths together in the kitchen at the Embassy. We did all kind of things such as painting stools in our lunch hour, in this back room, later turned into an office. Mr Daw discovered this and wasn’t very impressed. She was a good friend to me, especially while Max was in hospital. They were both nice. I had no idea they were lesbians, it was Max who opened my eyes, I had no idea at all. In those days you didn’t talk about such things, they didn’t exist, and if they did it was very hush-hush because you could be sent to prison for practicing that in those days. I remember one army sergeant was convicted and sent to Germany to a military prison when it was discovered he was a homosexual. That’s how it was then, things have changed a lot these days. 

Kommentar schreiben

3 July 2003

It’s my 32 birthday today and I realise I’m in the middle of a life transition. I’ve put all my thoughts about “what am I going to do with my life” off till “after the wedding”. And now I’m not only married but also a year older. I’m not working in an office and no longer moving myself slowly but surely up the career ladder. I’m at home most days working on various projects, which need all my dedication to keep them breathing. My mother says I am “doing nothing” and “wasting my time”; my brother is a high flying executive with an equally high flying exec girlfriend. Me, I’m gradually working my way through a pile of ‘thank you’ cards, working on this story, painting as much as possible and sometimes sinking into a grey mire of depression. Am I doing the right thing? I was once a marketing director; don’t I wish to build on that achievement? What about the bonus of a company car? I’ve agreed to sell hats in Switzerland for Klaus, also covering the regions of Tirol, Vorarlberg and South Tirol. It will be wonderful to visit some of the places June saw, Bozen, Meran. At the same time learn more about my country of origin while showing beautiful headwear. But we still don’t have a car. I’ll probably rent one for the trip.

Michael returned from a business trip to London bearing gifts: the “Writers’ and Artists’ Handbook 2003”. I called a publisher this morning and they said I need to find an agent and the best way to do so was using this book. They rarely publish unsolicited work. But do I wish to find an agent, or will I promote my work at smaller publishing houses? Will anyone print this? At the same time I feel like putting it off, dreading the hole I’ll fall into once it’s gone. What will I do then? Shall I start my own business or shall try for children? Do I get pregnant now that I am “doing nothing” or do I concentrate on my painting and the planned exhibition in November? As a society we are all so focused on “career” and “success”. When one tries to do something else there is a weight of disapproval, a weight I place carefully on my shoulders every morning. Which path do I wish to follow is a question only I can answer, am I doing the right thing, who knows? I hope I’ll find the definition for my life and can one day relax in the knowledge that this is I; this is what I stand for. And yes, I will be successful – but above all happy. In the meantime, I will endeavour to finish June’s story and maybe even…find a publisher!

Kommentar schreiben

1 June 2018

I never did find a publisher, though I did get an excerpt published in the Pretty Nostalgic Magazine that was simply wonderful. Unfortunately the magazine no longer exists, but I did love it so. And now I'm putting it out there on meet-my-life. Its not strictly my life you're meeting, but I guess I'm there too. At 47 I have changed my life round again, becoming a full-time artist. Not the easiest career path, but definitely very interesting! My mother still askes, "what are you doing all day now you've shut the shop?" So all those years later, what has really changed? I'm still working on this manuscript, and I'm still tweeking my life path. The real thing that has changed is I feel more confident with the chosen route. I am surer of myself as a painter than I have ever been and it makes me feel great to be able to do what I can do. As Tolstoy said: "Art = an infectious activity, the more infectious it becomes, the better."

Kommentar schreiben

Now I’ll tell you about various adventurous holidays we had after Stephanie was born.  When she was two, I took her to England for the first time. We flew; it was my first flight since my adventures coming up to Bozen in the army plane. When Stephanie was four Max had recovered enough and we determined we should go to England for our holiday. The only problem was our schedules didn’t coincide – I couldn’t leave so early and Max had to return earlier for some work he was doing. So he said he would take Stephanie by himself, by train on the Arlberg Express to Calais, then across on the boat, up to London where he would be met by his friend Herbert Böhm, now Mr Boon, and together they would drive down to Sussex where my parents lived. Herbert Böhm was from Reichenberg, but to be naturalised English citizen you had to take on an English name at the time, which had to start with the same letter as your foreign name, so he was now Mr Boon. He was a great skier, the first one to do an “Auerbach Salto”, a summersault on skis in the air. It was a famous event in those days, 1933 or thereabouts. Mr Boon had immigrated to England before the war because he was in love with a Jewess and his lady-friend didn’t want to stay in Reichenberg any longer. He had an embroidering firm, embroidering material with beads that he started up again in England and was doing quite well.

The first stage of the journey went very well, Max and Stephanie boarded the train and arrived in Basel. His brother and his wife came to see them at the station, because the train had a three-quarter of an hour wait, it being the frontier. They brought some milk for Stephanie to drink, which of course she refused to drink. Max himself was probably having sips of brandy by this time to keep himself going. He saw Trudel and Louis; the train travelled on and they arrived in Calais, all was well. While they were waiting for the boat to depart, the cross-Channel steamer, Stephanie said to Max (she spoke to him in German), “Daddy, what are those things floating on the water?” “Those are called buoys.” She couldn’t understand why they kept bobbing up and down so she asked, “are they sewn onto the water?” It’s a very sensible question, were the buoys sewn onto the water?

Max, with Stephanie in one hand, crutch in the other and the luggage following on behind with the porters no doubt in those days, it must have looked like a royal procession. They met Mr Boon at Victoria Station and Max was greatly overjoyed to see him again, they hadn’t seen each other since before the war. He found Max when he was recovering from his accident – a lady friend of Mr Boon discovered Max was in hospital, when she visited Vienna. She went to visit Max and thus they got in touch again. It was the first time in 1962, in thirty years, that they saw each other again. They had a great old reunion of course, in the Victoria buffet, celebrating with a few drinks. Then it was time to drive down to Crawley Down in Sussex. Herbert Boon had a car, so he was going to drive. Of course they didn’t find their way very well, they got slightly lost driving around in circles near Horley and Cookfield and that part of the world. Stephanie suddenly said, “why don’t we take an aeroplane, then we can see where we are, and find ourselves?” Eventually they turned up at my parent’s house where my mother was rather upset that they’d taken such a long time and were obviously still in a slightly inebriated condition. I joined the party about a week later also travelling out by train.

When Stephanie was round about five we had another adventure. We holidayed in Bibione in Italy, the place to go with small children in those days. It has a beautiful beach and we had a very good hotel. Max hadn’t been out in the sun having been in hospital all these years, so he put himself on a deckchair in bathing togs and didn’t cover up his legs. They were terribly burnt. The chemist, who was quite horrified, threw his hands in the air and said, “you must go to the hospital!” He gave Max something to paint on his legs and he recovered in the end. We returned to Austria on the train and visited Tragöss for a week to finish off with. The bus was late departing, we arrived at the station too late and the train was about to leave. The stationmaster was waving his red flag, blowing his whistle, the train was gathering up steam. And Stephanie shrieked. She shrieked so loudly that everybody stopped. The train stopped, the stationmaster stopped the train. We were saved and managed to board the train. Stephanie saved our holiday, so we didn’t have to wait another day for the next train. First the seaside and then the mountains, this was the way to organise your holiday in those days.

Good friends of ours, the Plesses, always had great ideas about holidays. When Stephanie was nine they suggested we should come with them (not Max, he wouldn’t manage it), along with some Swiss friends, a couple with a girl of about ten. The Plesses had four girls, Eva 18, Gaby 16, Putzi (who was Stephanie’s friend) and Claudia who was still younger. We had a mutual friend in Vienna called Marigold Slocock, a very eccentric lady, ‘a trick’ as my mother would have said. She was English and had lived in Ireland with an Irishman training horses. When that relationship went wrong she moved to Rome and taught English in this way she eventually arrived in Vienna. I remember one time she desperately wanted to go to the Campania Reiter Ball, a very noble and snobby ball. She was determined to go and go she did. She dressed herself up and bought a ticket and went on her own. She actually met some people she more or less knew there. Everybody knew Marigold. As time passed I sadly lost contact with her, she didn’t write any more, I think she went into a home and faded away. When you don’t hear anything it’s the end. 

At this time she was living in Ireland again in her cottage in Kinsale near Cork. She arranged that we should hire two caravans and three horses – one horse for each caravan and one riding pony for the children – to drive from Cork, Kinsale along the coast as far as we could in the ten days of our holiday. Stephanie and I arrived earlier, we took the train to London, crossed over to Cork and stayed with Marigold for a few days until the Plesses arrived with the two caravans they’d picked up in Cork. They drove all through the traffic, all the way to Kinsale, not knowing anything about caravans or horses, but they arrived safely! We enjoyed a great to-do with Marigold, it was all very jolly. We bought provisions and set off on the narrow lanes of southern Ireland. It was just like being in Cornwall, the scenery is very similar. Stephanie and I were in a caravan with the Swiss couple and their daughter. The Pless family were in the second caravan. The pony tailed along behind and was ridden by the girls every now and again. It was fun. Everything went quite well, the men were wonderful at making barbeques, we enjoyed good Irish steaks, plenty of wine and the weather was superb. One day we parked our caravans near some fields, there were official places where you were allowed to park, and we put the horses out to grass in a field. In the morning, when we wanted to harness them up to the caravans, they had vanished. We thought, ‘the horses have been stolen, what on earth shall we do?!’ Eva borrowed a bicycle from a nearby farmhouse; the men rushed out and about, everybody searched. The horses were finally discovered galloping up and down on a beach quite a long way a way. They were harnessed again and brought back to the caravans. Somebody must have opened the gate and let them out as a joke. They hadn’t been stolen, they’d just been let out. So the horses had an adventure too. Oh and another thing that happened in Ireland, one of the horses kicked the Swiss lady in the back, she’d ventured too close to the horse’s hindquarters. She fell flat and was slightly concussed.

We travelled on, time was up, we had to turn and return to Kinsale. For the last night in Kinsale we were  all looking forward to a dinner in a very smart hotel. It was the one and only hotel were you could get decent food, high class, not just Irish stew and those kinds of things. Stephanie was on the stoop of the caravan, the little platform at the front, trying to pull her gumboots off, formerly her skiing boots. The children didn’t have any riding boots, they just used gumboots for riding. It was hot, the gumboots had stuck, so I thought, ‘well, I’ll just have to pull the gumboots off’. I stepped up on this little platform and pulled. I thought, ‘now I mustn’t pull too hard, or I’ll fall off’. I pulled, the boot came off, I fell on the hard road on my elbow. I couldn’t move it. I thought, ‘now I’ve broken my elbow’. I was taken off to the doctor. “Can you straighten your arm?” “Yes I can” “Oh, its not broken, don’t worry, it’ll be all right, just put it in a sling”. I thought, ‘oh goodness me’. Then we went off and had our dinner in this posh hotel. The next day we had to take the boat back to England, Eva came with us, which was a good thing as I couldn’t carry anything with this so-called not broken elbow. Putzi and Stephanie and I were now going up to Suffolk to visit my mother. Eva was a great help, she was travelling on to somewhere else, the rest of Pless family were continuing their tour of Ireland. We arrived in London, where we spent the night with Mr Boon who very kindly put us up. The next day we took the train to visit my mother. We were going up to Suffolk, Little Bealings, where she was in a very nice home – the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Association home – in a big country house. It was a lovely place. She’d found rooms for us in a little cottage, not far off, called Lavender Cottage owned by Mr and Mrs Martin. They were a sweet old couple. It was absolutely gorgeous, the whole garden was full of long, long rows of lavender, cultivated for sale.

When I arrived at the home with the two children, the matron said, “what has happened to you?” I told her the story and she said, “oh you must go off to the hospital straight away, you can’t leave it like that”. They put me in the home car, the driver took me to the nearest hospital, I saw the doctor there in what was some kind of outpatients department. I told him this long story, “Oh” he laughed, he thought it was a great joke me falling off the caravan and damaging my elbow, “oh that’ll be all right, don’t worry, there’s nothing broken. Can you stretch your arm out?” “Yes” “Can you bend it?” “Yes” “Oh don’t worry, it’ll be all right”. Of course it didn’t get any better. After we’d stayed with my mother, Putzi and Stephanie went down to stay with a school friend of mine in Kent for two to three weeks to polish up their English. I returned to London and took the train back to Basel and to Lörrach, where Max was visiting his brother Louis. “Oh dear, what’s happened to your elbow? You must go to the hospital straight away!” So that was the third time. The German doctors were horrified, “what, you’ve been allowed to go round like this for two to three weeks?!” They took an x-ray straight away of course, which nobody in England had thought of doing, no, no it was just a funny joke. They saw that the tip of the elbow had been broken off and moved, wandered, and no operation could put it back again. I had to keep it in a sling; I wasn’t allowed to use it. I had to ring the office and say I couldn’t get back to work on time as planned, I couldn’t travel. They weren’t very pleased, but Max and I returned to Vienna eventually by car, which was a lovely trip and made up a little for the elbow situation. In Vienna I had to have another x-ray. This tip of elbow had wandered, they could see it. They said, “the main thing is that it doesn’t wander back into the joint, it’s very bad if it wanders back into the joint.” Eventually it grew onto another piece of bone in my arm. The difficult thing was the therapy to straighten my arm again; it was all bent from being in a sling the whole time. I had to go to the hospital twice a week for this treatment. It was incredibly painful. They tried to bend my arm back again, bend it, straight, bend it. Two other patients were having various treatments at the same time and all they could say was, “oh whee”, “oh whee”. I thought I’m not going to say “oh whee”, I shall keep my mouth tightly shut and not join in with this chorus. I did have some trouble later once, but I think the piece of bone, if it did get in the joint, got out again.

Another travel story happened on our journey home when Max, Stephanie aged 11, and I had been home on holiday to visit my parents in England, again on the train as it was the way everybody travelled in those days. We caught the ferry from Dover to Calais and engaged in conversation with some woman. For entry into France we had to have our passports stamped on the boat and as Max couldn’t walk very well, this woman, being very friendly and nice, said, “oh I’ll take the passports for you and get them stamped.” This was very helpful and she came back again – this happened right at the last minute before docking in Calais. Max probably had had a couple of whiskeys in the bar, and I didn’t remember in the muddle of getting the luggage together and finding a porter. We disembarked and found our train back to Vienna. Then, all of a sudden, in our carriage, Max couldn’t find the passports. “That woman hasn’t returned them!” He maintained this insistently and I certainly didn’t have them, he had organised the stamping of the passports. He told the guard, and the guard made an announcement throughout the entire station. This woman, whom we’d given the passports to, was going on another train to somewhere Germany in a completely different direction. “Please get in touch, do you have the Schmiderer passports given to you to have stamped on the boat.” There was no answer, she couldn’t be found. We didn’t know what to do, we had no tickets and no passports. We were on the train with very little money, but we thought there’s nothing we can do, we can’t find this woman; we’ll just have to go on with it. The train started off and the ticket collector came round, Max explained this all to him causing a great hoo-ha. Then he had another search through his belongings and found he had the passports inside his jacket pocket. Obviously the woman had given them back and he’d forgotten, thought they should be in some other place, where I do not know. There was a terrible fuss, we were on the train with no passport no money, thinking ‘what on earth is going to happen to us?’ Luckily the situation was saved, but it was very nerve wracking I must stay.

Another holiday, after Max had died, I’d arranged with Lisl, my friend here who now lives in Baden, to go and visit Nancy who lived up in Lancashire and from there we arranged to go on an organised bus trip to Scotland. Lisl and I set off, we collected Nancy, located the bus from Skipton to Oban, a good long trip and settled into a nice hotel in Oban. The plan was that the bus would take us over to Iona, the location of a very famous medieval monastery. The Benedictine monks from Ireland had settled in Scotland before moving further across Europe in the course of time and were known as Scottish monks although they were in fact Irish. In Vienna there is a famous monastery and school called the Schottenstift, which is now known to be incorrectly named, but then, as they arrived from Scotland, it was automatically assumed they were Scottish monks. Anyway, these monks built this beautiful monastery in Iona and the ruins thereof are very famous. It was the thing to do, to visit this monastery on Iona. We set off one morning on the bus to the coast, Oban is on the coast, but we had travel to this other little island, and from this intermediary island by ferry to Iona further out to sea. That was fine; we caught the boat, walked round the monastery and had lunch at a pub. It was all very interesting, there was a very mysterious atmosphere surrounding the ruins. My mother had been there earlier, and told me all about it. She was quite enamoured of Iona and the spiritual feeling still tangible in this monastery. We knew the time the ferry that would take us back to the other little island visible across the straights, where we would board the bus, cross that island and thus return to Oban. “There’s a ferry every ten minutes, so don’t worry.” We were in the tourist shop where they had some very pretty mugs and I wanted to buy one for Stephanie to take back as a present. Some woman snatched the mug I’d chosen away from under my nose, and said, “I’m having this” and paid for it. I thought, ‘oh dear, now I’ll have to find another mug’. Lisl kept saying, “hurry up, hurry up, it’s time for the ferry to go back to the bus on the island!” “Well, he said it went every ten minutes, so there’s no need to hurry”. I chose another mug and paid for it. We walked down to the wharf and waited. The ferry we should have caught had departed, we saw it going off, but we thought the next ferry should be coming any minute now. Another ferry came, which we marched onto, thinking ‘now we’re going back to this little island where our bus is waiting’. However, instead of going to the island, this ferry turned out to sea. It turned right out into the Atlantic Ocean. We said, “what’s happened, we can’t do this, our bus on that little island over there is waiting for us!” “No, no madam, this ferry takes you out to a large ocean going steamer, returning to Oban after a round trip of the islands, we can’t take you back to your island, its quite impossible, you’ll have to go on this ship, then you’ll get back to Oban eventually.” “We’ve got no money, we can’t buy any tickets”, “oh that can’t be helped madam, we’re not doing any thing else.” So we had no choice but to sail out to this huge ship, anchored outside the estuary. Our little ferry approached the side of an enormous ship, which opened its hold, a huge gap in the side, to take in the passengers. Between our ferry and this open gaping hole of this enormous ship there was what looked like the huge round back of a humped-back whale made of rubber. We said to the sailors, “what do we do?” “Oh you’ll have to jump onto this rubber and we’ll push you and pull you in.” They took us, one by one, and kind of threw us on. We had to decide who would go first, so I thought, ‘take your courage in both hands, June, and go first’. We stepped right to the edge of the ferry’s deck – I had an umbrella in one hand as well as my handbag round my neck. One sailor kind of gave me a shove onto this humped back and the sailor on the other side, in the hold, grabbed me. My umbrella nearly went into the sea, but I managed to hang on to it and be caught by the sailor who hauled me in. That’s what they did to all the other passengers too. It was the most terrifying experience I can tell you, I thought I was going down to the bottom of the sea any minute. Now we were all safely on board this liner as stowaways. We had no money, we had no tickets, we had nothing. I said, “we must go to the purser, we must go and find the purser”. Lisl kept on telling me, “it’s all your fault, it’s all your fault. You should have come on when I told you!” She was extremely furious with me for missing the proper ferry. We saw the people on the little island with our bus waiting, then we saw the bus driving away. There was no point in going back to Iona. We interviewed the purser and told him our dismal story. He laughed a lot, saying, “oh, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter, you just come on with us”. We then thought we’d go and have a cup of tea in the restaurant, we could manage to pay for that, we had some small change with us, but not enough for buying a ticket on an ocean liner. We sat down, and Nancy, who had taken the plastic bag with my mug, which had caused all the trouble, managed to drop it and smash it. So the mug was smashed, and it was all my fault we were on this ocean liner. We drank our cup of tea and went up on deck. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and we had this lovely trip all round these little islands, we saw seals basking on rocks, we really had a very lovely trip. We returned to Oban, disembarked and walked back to our hotel, fortunately not very far from the docks. It was dinnertime and as we walked into the dining room there were shouts and hoorays and this, that and the other when they saw us marching in! The people who’d been with us thought we’d got lost, we’d have to spend the night in Iona, they’d never see us again. So when we appeared there was a great hallo going on. Thank goodness we were safe and sound once more. Lisl laughs about it now, but at the time she was in a great state! 

Kommentar schreiben

21 July 2003

June is looking wan and tired. During the past few weeks she’s been living in a whirl. Stephanie is here and clearing out her flat for new tenants, bringing her things to store with June, clearing out her mother’s flat to make room. Richard and Karen visited too. I suggested we all go to the Heuriger am Reisenberg with a stunning view over Vienna, but then almost wish I hadn’t as I see the upheaval involved. At 3pm I arrive and meet Richard and Karen. Richard, with elements of old-style colonialism still clinging to him, dapper with tightly belted waist firmly admits he hates getting old. However, at 79 he’s still going strong and despite being short of breath insists on driving us all in his rented WV Panda. Karen, bright and cheerful, buzzes around and tells us we must shout the directions otherwise he won’t hear, though she does reassure us apart from this slight disability he is a good driver. They’ve obviously spent the morning map reading and writing down the route, but either the chosen road does not exist or we miss it amidst our looking and shouting. We hit the curb only once and only once does Richard swear, “bastards!” He’s obviously on foreign territory. We make it and sit down relived to admire the view, eat and drink. Everyone, that is Karen and myself, takes photos, we all begin to look visibly more relaxed. It turns out to be a success after all. On the way home June and Karen thank me for showing them the heuriger and the view. I am relived that they did derive some pleasure from the outing.

June tells me how they went to Weissenkirchen, how Karen wished to look at the Melk monastery and left “the children” sitting on a hard bench in the car park as they couldn’t manage the steps. However, she doesn’t like it, its too ornate for her taste and in retribution brings June and Richard two dripping, rapidly disintegrating, ice creams. I’ve also brought ice cream today, in a small polystyrene box, from the ice-cream parlour in Hietzing. June is not sure whether it will be good for her sore throat, but eats a little. Its too hot, but her flat is agreeably cool. She tells me Max helped Della Lucia, the ice cream parlour, start up again after the war. Max knew Herr Haas from Haas Backpulver who had a big factory in Northern Bohemia (where Max was from) and in Linz (where Petz sweets were made). He managed to obtain milk powder from Herr Haas and thus Della Lucia could start making ice cream again.

Kommentar schreiben

20 June 2018

Family holidays are a funny thing. We never really had a real family holiday until the summer between school and university. With Dad being a hotel manager we had the most wonderful holidays in various sunny places, but it was never a family holiday. He was always working and my brother and I would be free to roam during the day, Mum would sun-bathe somewhere. What was required was to turn up washed and clean at mealtimes. Every now and then the day would include an outing to look at something. My father spent a long time working in Calabria. My brother and I became expert at flying to Lamezia Therme on our own, changing flights in Rome for half-term holidays. Once I was able to take a school friend with me. I can't really remember much of it, except that her swimming goggles broke. Later, when he went back to work in the same hotel, I was probably about 17 by then, I sold ice-cream on the beach. It nearly killed me. I was equipped with a wooden box, painted and decorated by me, a sunhat in two-colour straw and the box would be filled with ice-creams and ice. I would carry this around the beach at mid-day. Fortunatly most of the guests were Germans, though I did get proficient at touting "Gelati" to the few Italians. This resulted in a heafty case of sun-stroke - meaning I collapsed on the beach one afternoon, having complained of feeling unwell earlier. Some friendly guests carried me back to my bungalow. Finally it was obvious I was really ill. That was the end of my ice-cream selling career. 

Anyway our first family holiday, as a real family, all on holiday, was a trip to Barbados where my father knew somebody. This man was the official body of Barbados, when the Queen visited, he would officially welcome her. He had a son, pretty much my age, who would take me round the island at night. The days were lovely, just after A-levels, perfect. In the morning we would get up, go swimming in our almost private beach, then back across the road to the bungalow where my father would make a delicious fry-up. After breakfast the day would be spent lying on the beach, relaxing, reading and a bit more swimming. Once I tried to water-ski - but I was so petrified as the further out we went, the clearer it became to me there were probably sharks in the water, I simply mustn't fall in! The evenings were spent on the town with Greg, drinking rum and coke, meeting his friends. Greg tried to convince me to stay there, but what would I do? We visited one of his friends in her home - surrounded by barbed wire fencing, with five dogs, she still entered the house with her knife held aloft. And I do love clothes - in Barbados the only viable dress style is shorts and a T-shirt. Besides, I didn't love Greg and at just 18 I felt there was still so much to discover and see of the world. 

Kommentar schreiben

In those days the Queen’s Birthday Party was a great occasion at the Embassy, all the British subjects were invited and an Army Band played up on the balcony. The Benevolent Fund old ladies we’d been visiting in the wintertime were all asked and came in their best dresses; all the residents registered at the Consulate were invited. This continued for several years, until the whole scene changed. Then only the top business people were invited, the diplomats, top army officers, no old ladies and hardly any British subjects, except for those who were prominent business men. The whole attitude changed, which, in my opinion, wasn’t good. At first it was a real event for the English people here in Vienna who had been here many years. It was generally held in the Residence garden – a lovely big garden at the back of the house and one was served delicious things to eat and drink. One saw all kinds of people there. We who worked at the Embassy acted as hosts and it was our duty to walk round and talk to people, see they were being entertained and that they had something to eat or drink. These days it’s quite different, an awful crush, you can hardly get inside. Its not much fun when you hardly see anybody you know, because you’re not on that “social” level any longer. I went last year and it rained, it was horrible. Generally they have a band playing; one of the military bands comes from Germany. British troops are still stationed in Germany, however there are no longer any British troops in Austria. They usually march up and down in the garden, this time they marched up and down in the Metternichgasse as it was raining, everyone with umbrellas, it wasn’t a great success.

The Queen came to Vienna in 1968 with Princess Anne, Princess Alexandra and Prince Philip to open the British Week. A big, big British Week was held in Vienna that year, all the British goods were displayed in lots of top Austrian shops and British plays were put on at the Theatre an der Wien. It was a great deal of hard work for the Commercial Section of the Embassy to get this British Week organised and make it a success. There was a special show at the Spanish riding school that we all had seats to see. The Queen talked to the horses and their riders, we could see everything from the galleries around the Ring where the horses performed. Another of the highlights was the series of Fashion Shows, given on the stage in the ballroom at the Hotel Continental. These were very witty short scenes, illustrated by the appropriate music and were a great success. In the Embassy Residence we were introduced to the Queen and Prince Philip. For this special occasion we all had to wear hats and gloves, be dressed properly of course. Approximately half the staff collected in the big drawing room and the other half in the small drawing room; there was a small sitting room in between.  Most of us from the Commercial Section were in the big drawing room. The Queen and Prince Philip went around separately; the Queen with the Ambassador and several of her staff, Prince Philip with his people and Princess Alexandra. Before the Queen came up to greet us, she met the children of the staff in the corridor downstairs. Stephanie was there; all the children of the staff were waiting in the entrance hall in the building. I’ve have a photo of the Queen entering, you see her back as she was talking to the children, with Stephanie to one side. The Queen started off in our room where the atmosphere was very sedate, very quiet. The Queen should not have been introduced to people, she should have just gone past and stopped or nodded. But by mistake she was introduced to one person and etiquette demanded that if being introduced to one of us, she now had to be introduced to every one of us. So, poor thing, she had to shake us all by the hand and say a few words to every single person standing in the room. We all had to do a little curtsey, our bob and not say anything till spoken to. When she asks a question one can answer, but one mustn’t start a conversation until one is addressed. She had to go all the way round this big room, shaking hands, making a remark to everyone – I think she’s an amazing person. Prince Philip was in the other room making jokes on his walk round. You could hear everybody laughing loudly in his room, whereas our room was as quiet as a mouse! Then the Queen moved into the other room, and Prince Philip came round. He was joking, but he didn’t shake everybody’s hand, he just kind of stopped every now and again and made some kind of joke. With him was Princess Anne, who later went riding on some of the Lipizzaner. This was followed by a big reception at some hotel with a huge ballroom. All the British Colony, all the old ladies, all the residents who were registered, everybody who was on the Consulate list was invited. The Queen was there, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip and Princess Anne. It was the great event of the year. The Royal Party stayed at the Hotel Imperial with their staff – the Queen bringing her own Scottish water with her for her tea! 

Princess Diana and Prince Charles came after they were married when Herr Zilk was the Lord Mayor of Vienna. There was a great faux pax at the dinner given in their honour – and it was televised. When people make toasts, according to English tradition the person receiving the toast should remain seated. So when the toast was made, Prince Charles and Princess Diana remained seated. The Austrians couldn’t understand this, they all stood there holding up their glasses and waiting for Prince Charles and Princess Diana to stand up. Princess Diana stood up in a hurry realising they were not conforming to the Austrian custom (you see, if you were the Queen I would get up and say, “here’s to her Majesty”. Then you would nod, and probably make a speech after that). Herr Zilk didn’t realise that. Poor Princess Diana stood up in such a hurry she knocked her chair over backwards causing even more confusion as the chair had to be stood up again. Then they were all standing up, so the toasts could be drunk and speeches made. This was preceded by a coach ride with Herr Zilk and his wife Dagmar Koller through the centre of Vienna. It was all a bit of a farce. Prince Charles and Diana were on a state visit to Austria after their marriage. Wherever it is deemed necessary to maintain good relations with a foreign country, members of the Royal Family are dispatched on official visits. They lead a very hard life, not at all easy, as everybody seems to think. I admire them all very much indeed. I remember the Queen very well and seeing Princess Alexandra at the theatre. She is the Queen’s cousin, the daughter of the Duke of Kent. However, I’ve lost track of all these dukes and duchesses now, I used to know them all off by heart.

Kommentar schreiben

7 October 2003

I’m sitting in a restaurant in Seefeld, Tyrol, checking through this manuscript again. Kate has kindly proofread it for me. She’s a technical proofreader who works at the Japanese Mission in Vienna. A Texan married to an Austrian and a great friend. Her comments are clear and concise. Much has happened since I last read through this manuscript. I sent it to an agent in London, who after looking at it, wrote back, “Dear Ms Laubscher, Thank you for sending me the MS which I read with both interest and enjoyment.  However, as I mentioned on the phone, these books are very hard to sell in, and one has to be really sure about them if one is to take them on, and I just did not feel quite convinced enough.  I wish you every success in placing it elsewhere, Yours   sincerely...” On speaking to her she said she’s sure I’d get it printed, but she’d only be 70-80% behind it and she only takes on texts that convince her completely. She’s brisk and optimistic.

In the meantime June worries that she’s said something incriminating. She thinks she is maybe getting ‘cold feet’. But even when reading through this for the umpteenth time, I’m still fascinated by her story and determined to bring it into print. I look forward to seeing her again soon and must remember to post my postcard of Innsbruck to her. I’ve been away for two weeks, a long break; we normally see each other once a week. I’m acting as sales representative for Muehlbauer hats, but its difficult selling summer hats in a predominantly mountainous winter region. However, it’s always interesting to go on a short trip, meet new people, see new places. The people in Tyrol have been very kind on the whole, and so helpful it’s amazing. One lady gave me and my two big paper bags of hats a lift in her car in Kitzbuehel this morning, a shop owner wrote me instructions how to get to my next meeting and said to call her if I get lost on the way this afternoon. In several places I see Louis Trenker fashion and it reminds me of the original who made it possible for June to obtain some Dirndl fabric. 

 I’m sitting alone at a restaurant table, its started gently snowing outside, listening to “Austro-pop” playing live at the back of the room, “ich halt dich in meine Arme, tanz den letzten Tanz mit mir….”[1].

 [1] Translation: “I hold you in my arms, dance the last dance with me…”

Kommentar schreiben

We flew to Sydney and were met by my cousin. At the time foot and mouth disease was rife in Austria, so when we arrived at the airport, they caught hold of us and said, “you’ve just come from Austria? Oh you must come in here and be disinfected”. We had to walk across mats and I don’t know what and the doctors had to look at us to see that we weren’t foot and mouth disease carriers. I said, “we’ve come from Vienna, and there’s no foot and mouth disease in Vienna”. “Oh that doesn’t matter, Austria has foot and mouth, you have to be looked at and disinfected.” After walking on the mat and being disinfected we were met by Keva, my second cousin and Stephanie’s godmother who came to Vienna when Stephanie was three months old. When Stephanie was six months old we all holidayed in Tragöss together. I don’t know how we managed it, we travelled on busses, on trains and pushed her all round Tragöss at the age of six months. We were staying with Keva in Sydney. My aunt was still there, my mother’s sister, Aunty Dorothy, we visited her and her daughter Ann, my cousin, in Killara. We looked at our own house, which had been sold and much altered. Another storey had been added onto it, half the garden had been sold and another house was being built there. It was all very sad. We enjoyed our stay in Sydney and visited various relatives of my mother’s. Stephanie went riding at a farm station above Sydney. Then Keva took us up to Canberra where we stayed in a hotel. We travelled up to the skiing resort Treadbow in the Snowy Mountains. Threadbow was a very famous resort, anybody who was anybody used to go skiing there. Stephanie is a very good skier, so we went up to the slopes to see what was going on. The ski instructors were all from Carinthia. Austrian ski instructors! They used to spend their year divided between Austria in the winter and Australia in the summer, teaching skiing to the Australians. It was very funny listening to them talking to each other in their Carinthian dialect, making fun of their pupils. We could more or less understand what they were saying.

We visited Palm Beach, but of course it was winter in Australia, so one couldn’t go swimming. We flew over to New Zealand for a fortnight to visit my cousin David and his father, Uncle Barclay, my mother’s brother. He was still alive then, his wife had died earlier. He lived in Cambridge, and David in Wellington. David was the Head of the Music Section of the Wellington University; he is a composer and plays the violin. He’s a great musician, David. When we landed at the airport in Wellington I was quite terrified, as the runway is built on a long narrow promontory, stretching out to sea and it looked as though we were going to land in the water! Then we drove up to see his father in Cambridge in North Island. We drove up through the lakes and the woods and past the volcanic mountains. The forests had largely been done away with for sheep farming. It was so sad seeing all these hills quite bare, covered in grass, eroding everywhere, just for sheep farming. For the wool and the meat shipped to England. New Zealand Lamb. We saw the sulphur coming out of the ground, boiling and bubbling hot mud wells, and the famous geysers. We stayed in a funny hut for hire at Rotarua, heated by steam coming out of the ground. One could also see the steam issuing out of the ground in people’s gardens. The earth was bubbling, big pools of bubbling earth coming out with a big ‘plop’. Black and greasy, it was rather frightening. We spent a whole day in Rotarua looking at all these peculiar events. Then we stayed with Uncle Barclay, which I enjoyed, after which we drove back taking a different route along Lake Taopoul, a very volcanic area. On the edge of this lake, instead of pebbles there were pumice stones. A pumice stone is something you used to take ink off your fingers. I gathered a whole load of pumice stones to give to people as gifts back home. Stephanie went skiing using borrowed skis on this volcano, but she said it was very wet snow, I don’t think she enjoyed her skiing there so much. Julian, her second cousin, now lives in Budapest and comes over once or twice, so we still have some contact with New Zealand.

That was our highly enjoyable trip to New Zealand. Hundertwasser, a well-known Austrian artist and painter, loved New Zealand and Wellington. He had a house there; he died not so long ago. He had an exhibition in Wellington when we were there, which was fascinating, I loved it, loved his paintings. They reminded me greatly of Klimt, the same kind of little ornaments and beautiful colours. In Wellington, in the early days, all the houses were built of wood because of the earthquakes. New Zealand is a very volcanic region and when it was first settled they were very much afraid of earthquakes. Therefore the original houses were all one storey and built of wood. Even the parliament buildings, which are beautiful, were built of wood. The original parliament building is still there, of course they have new buildings these days, they know how to deal with earthquakes now.

I visited Sydney again by myself in 1992. Aunt Dorothy had already passed away, but I stayed with my cousin Ann in their house. I also stayed with my cousin Keva and her husband Tim in Bowral in the mountains. She took me to Canberra again; we went over the new parliament buildings. Canberra’s all very new, it was built out of nothing as the capital for the whole of Australia. She and Tim took me round in a wheelchair, as I couldn’t walk very well any longer. We looked at the Opera House in Sydney, which is also very beautiful. It hadn’t quite been opened yet; it was going to be opened at the end of the year. A beautiful building on the edge of Sydney harbour, very exciting to see. Keva and her husband had a beautiful house and a lovely garden; they ran a garden magazine. They’re retired now and live in Canberra and are probably coming to Vienna in August 2002. I haven’t seen her since 1992, so I’m looking forward to seeing them again. Tim is 80, he’s just one year younger than I am, but he’s in a much better state, being able to move round much better than I can. Stephanie will be here then too, and Julian will come over from Budapest, so there will be a Farquar reunion.

Kommentar schreiben

7 February 2004

I gave June a copy of the manuscript as a Christmas present and, though Kate has proof read it and I’ve looked through it countless times, of course she still finds mistakes. But I think she is enjoying reading it, finally also seeing my “in-between” bits. I met a lovely lady through a friend a couple of weeks ago, in an intensely intellectual creative evening drinking red wine in her small flat, surrounded by her paintings, red and green pressing in from the walls. She knows a publisher in Salzburg and offered to pass the manuscript onto her friend there. I’m still not sure exactly what the connection is, but it was wonderful to receive some enthusiastic feedback and a kind, handwritten note. Even though the result was still a “no, we can’t print it” it was because of the language. “It would loose its unique flavour if we translate it into German. It needs to be printed in English”.

On Bill’s request to meet June, we invite Bill Barlow and his lovely blond, Boston wife Katherine to tea. June is momentarily in a dither, it’s such short notice, but she wants to see them before Stephanie arrives on Thursday, well if they can’t do Saturday, it will just have to be Friday. Will I do everything? Also buy some salty nibbles to eat with the sherry afterwards? Should we have sandwiches? Will a cake be OK? But I must buy a nice looking cake, not one of those pastry pieces. Shall we use her Augarten china? Her hand-embroidered tablecloth to match? I reply not to worry, I will be there an hour early and everything will be fine. In the end I bake a cake with the apricots Michael and I picked in June’s garden last summer. She’s delighted.

Bill and his wife arrive and we enjoy a “lovely English tea”. My British accent is once again given a quick polish, dusting off any European-American slant it’s acquired. Bill is a “fascinating chap” with a diverse history in the Ministry of Defence, has also written a book, and knows some very interesting people. He heard of an opportunity in Vienna, and within two weeks he and his wife had packed and moved here, to enjoy his retirement – though he’s so busy doing everything from teaching English to meeting official people and representing some part of Britain or the British Army that I wonder when he puts his feet up. He does know a publisher in London, and even a retired agent, he would be happy to pass this manuscript on. Wonderful news! June is not getting any younger, and it would be fantastic to have something done about turning it into a book. I’d like to devote more time to chasing agents, but its hard going and what with my painting, trying to set myself up as a creative consultant and various other odd jobs I sometimes wonder if I’m doing too much. I also needed a break from “the book” having spent very intense periods with it last year. Now I feel I can see it again, feel it and put it forward. I’m not in a rush to find someone, I’d rather go slow but do it properly, but time presses on. I wonder what the feedback will be from Bill, Katherine, the potential publisher, the agent. Oh exciting times ahead!

Kommentar schreiben

 
Now I’ll tell you a little about my husband, Max von Schmiderer. He was born in Reichenberg, Northern Bohemia on the 16 October 1908. Northern Bohemia at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all German speaking. One of his forefathers originally came from Tyrol and fought with Andreas Hofer in South Tyrol against Napoleon. His great grandfather was Bürgermeister of Marburg, now Maribor, Slovenia; there was even a Schmiderer Allee in his honour. The “von” in the name probably dates back to this date, awarded to his great grandfather for services to the Kaiser. It’s not a high aristocratic title. Max’s father was born in Marburg, Southam Styria, which was given to the Slovenians after the First World War. His father was a professor of mathematics, and worked in Reichenberg (now Liberec, Czech Republic) at the Higher Technical School, it being part of Austria in those days. He built a beautiful big house on the hill over looking the reservoir where Max was born in 1908 and his brother one year earlier in 1907. Max went to school in Reichenberg, and then studied architecture at Prague University as well as art at the Bildende Künste in Prague. He received his diploma of architecture with the title of Diplom Ingenieur; in those days they didn’t have any other titles for that profession. He then worked in an architect’s office for a while before setting up on his own and had quite a flourishing architectural bureau until the war came in 1939. He was exempted from service in the army for two years owing to the building work he was doing for the Germans; office buildings, municipal buildings, work that was exempted from war service until 1941. Then he was called up and had to join the army as a private with the Air Force, which of course he hated, he didn’t agree with the Nazis or Hitler. At first he was sent to training camp in Vienna, Kagran, where he met his good friend Hans Moritz who was very Viennese and very funny. Hans continued to be a good friend of Max’s till the end of his life. So Max was in the army training as a private though he didn’t want to have anything to do with the army at all, but he had to be in it. He wasn’t going to take on any officer’s rank, although he could have done so quite easily. He was posted to an anti-aircraft division that went to France, where he remained till the end of the war. Various peculiar things happened to him there. He was designated to be a batman to one of the higher officers and he was such a perfect batman that the officer didn’t want to let him go. He knew, for example, that when you were waiting on an officer entertaining a lady-friend you always entered backwards to allow them time to adjust themselves. Max applied for leave to finish some of his building work in Reichenberg, but the officer wouldn’t put his leave application forward. Max was so annoyed that one day, when he was serving his officer, who was probably having a little tête-à-tête, he tipped the soup down over his lap. The officer was furious; they had a big argument resulting in Max being sent to a detention-battalion in the marshes somewhere in France. They had to be taken there by boat, it was all very terrible. Max was so furious he kept on writing letters to the very highest of the army commanders in his division, who at last agreed to interview him. He went and explained what had happened and why. Max always said the higher you get in the army, if you speak to the highest officers they’re always very helpful and intelligent, the lower down you get the more obstructive and unpleasant they can be. In the end his leave was granted and he was taken away from this detention camp in the midst of the marshes. The war was coming to an end and he was determined to return to Czechoslovakia. So he deserted, he just went. That would have been in March 1945. He walked all the way from France back to Reichenberg in Northern Bohemia. He had to pass through the French occupation zone in Germany. He was given succour by various farming families; hidden in lofts; given food and clothes – he had to get rid of his army uniform. He found an old bicycle and bound up the tyres with cloth when they burst, as there were no new tyres available. By the time he reached Czechoslovakia, still with this bicycle, one side of his face was white and one side of burnt brown as he was always going from west to east. He went through the French zone, the American zone, and somehow always managed to obtain a permit. One had to have a permit with a stamp on it to enable one to go on; they wanted to see your papers the whole time. Every time he entered another zone he had to obtain new papers. When he entered the Russian zone he sat on the roadside talking to the Russian soldiers, rolling cigarettes in pieces of newspaper, trying to make up to them. He was very good at talking to people; he was a very open kind of person. He reached the Czech frontier in the end, and had to pass through the Czechs. He didn’t know much Czech because he had no talent for languages at all. He had a good artistic eye but not a good musical ear, so his Czech was never very fluent. At the Czech boarder he had to pass through the Czech sentry post who looked at his papers which had been stamped by the Russians, the Americans, and the French beforehand. They looked at him very suspiciously and, this was his way of telling it, they said, “Schmiderer, das ist ein österreichischer Name, ein deutscher Name” He answered in his best Czech, “that doesn’t matter, I am Czech”. In the end they let him through. He was determined to get back to his mother in Reichenberg. The situation was terrible, people were being thrown out of the country, they were being killed and murdered in all directions. He was determined to return to his mother by Mother’s Day, in May, and was actually successful. He travelled back to his mother on bicycle, on foot, all the way from France. It took him about two months. The conditions were terrible, the Sudeten Germans were not allowed any rations, they were given nothing to eat, they couldn’t buy anything in the shops. They had to wear a band on their sleeve with a large “N” on it, which meant German. His car, which he’d bought just before the war, a beautiful Skoda, a white cabriolet, he’d hardly ever driven it, was taken away by the Russians. That was not a great loss, though of course he was sad to lose his beautiful car. The thing was they weren’t even given any food. He went to the butchers and just begged for some bones to make some soup because they still had some vegetables in the garden. “No, no. No Germans are given any bones to make soup.” All they had was in the cellar and in the garden, vegetables, potatoes and jams his mother had made. They used to cut the potatoes in thin slices and put them on top of the coal or wood stove, something they could still cook on, there was no gas. Toast these slices of potato and put jam on them; boil up any vegetables in the garden. This was the only food available. In the end Max tried to get away. He had an uncle in Switzerland, who tried to help him through the Swiss consulate in Prague, but that didn’t work out, he wasn’t given an exit permit. He tried to board a train repatriating people to Italy with his mother, but they discovered he didn’t have the right papers; they were turned off the train. He’d taken all the luggage down in a big hand cart, which he’d pulled all the way down to the station, it’s very hilly in Reichenberg, and he had to pull all the luggage, bits of clothes they had left, back to the house. He was in a very bad state. This went on all through the summer of 1945, things were getting worse and worse, people were being driven out, on foot, by train. People were being murdered on the way, thrown off the bridge at Aussig an der Elbe, women and children thrown by the Czechs into the river. There was a terrible trek from Brunn to Vienna where people were killed on the way, they were marched, and when they couldn’t march any longer they were shot and thrown in the ditch. It was a very terrible time.

Max still had some quite good cloth for making suits. In the end, with the money and goods he had that were any good to anybody, he managed to find a man who was driving a lorry to Vienna. He thought he and his mother could get as far as Vienna, because his mother had a brother living in Mödling, on the outskirts. This uncle was reputed to be a ne’er do well; his mother’s family had a large cloth factory in Reichenberg, they were all famous for making cloth in that region, but her brother was an adventurer type and left early, before the war, quite a long time ago. He had quite a lot of money, but was a miserly kind of person. Max wanted to get to Austria because he felt very Austrian, it being his father’s country. In the end he managed by hook or by crook, to persuade this lorry driver to drive him and his mother as far as Vienna. His mother sat in the front next to the driver, Max stood up behind the driver’s cabin. He had a hat on which was immediately blown away by the wind. They drove all the way from Reichenberg in the north near the Polish frontier, Max standing at the back with no cover on him at all, in December 1945. Before war broke out, in the summer, Max was hoping to marry his good friend Olli (Olga) with whom he was very much in love. She was Czech, her father was a rabid Czech and completely forbid her to marry Max during the war. He said if she did he would commit suicide, he wouldn’t have anything to do with any German speaking person. In the end Olli gave it up and that was the end of that, except they kept in touch. During the summer of 1945 she came to see Max, which was dangerous for her, bringing a large, very long salami sausage and as much money as she could gather up. She came to see Max and said, “ich schäme mich für mein Volk[1]” and gave him everything she’d collected to help him and his mother. She was a very nice, kind person, we’ve been in touch with her ever since. She died in November 2002. Olli was a very dear and good person and a true friend to Max, me and Stephanie.

Just before the end of the Second World War it was agreed by the Allies at Yalta (Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle and Stalin) and later at Potsdam (Berlin) after the end of the War that the German-speaking population of Czechoslovakia, East Prussia, Silesia, should be expelled from their homes in these countries where their families had lived for generations – in Rumania, Hungary, Slovenia and Poland. Three and a half million people were driven out or killed, losing all their properties, many had all they owned confiscated except what they were wearing – they were only allowed to carry 20 kilos with them. They received no redress, no reparations, and were not even given assistance in any form by U.N.R.R.A., which helped non-German-speaking refugees. The frontiers of those countries were re-drawn. Up to this day – the year 2003 – no compensation has been paid by these countries to any of the expelled population or their descendants. They had to start with nothing in Austria and Germany to build up their lives from scratch after 1945.

Max and his mother managed to arrive in Vienna. The lorry only went as far as Meidling and Max confused Meidling with Mödling, so then they had somehow to reach Mödling and his uncle. They got there somehow in the end, it’s still quite a long way. He and his mother were given rooms and something to eat, there was nothing much to eat in Vienna then either. They were safe for the time being, till the Russians issued an order that any “Volksdeutsche”, people from the previous countries where the Germans had been living, had to report to the Russian Kommanditur straight away, Mödling being in the Russian zone. They were all going to be sent back to Russia. Max said, “that’s no good, we can’t stay here”. He discovered the whereabouts of his good friend Hans Moritz whom he’d met at the training camp in Kagran. Hans lived in Ober St Veit in the British zone with his parents. Max and his mother were taken in by Hans Moritz, his mother and father and lived with them till October 1948, when he moved into this flat where I am still living now, in the Tirolergasse, just opposite the wall of the gardens of Schönbrunn Palace. Max was always one with an eye for the girls, and had quietly engaged himself to a girl, Yvonne Fiala, living with her brother and parents in this flat. However the flat, with its three rooms, was not large enough for a family with two grown up children as well as the parents. Max was always trying to earn some money some way or other to keep his mother and himself; for example he managed to find the Fiala family a house to purchase in Ober St Veit. As commission, they asked the then owner of this house, Lothar Eichinger, if he could be given this flat.

I’d like to tell you a little bit about Max’s connections with Switzerland. His uncle was a chemist working with Ciba in Basel before the First World War and was sent to London by the company, then the First World War broke out and he couldn’t get back again. He was interned on the Isle of Man till the end of the war, 1918 when he returned to Switzerland. Switzerland was a haven of peace and prosperity compared to the surrounding countries, Germany and Austria. The inflation was terrible in those days. Max was born in 1908, so at the end of the war he would have been about ten. In 1920, his uncle who was then back in Basel, his mother’s brother, Ernst Mueller, invited his sister and the two boys, Max and Louis, to stay with him in his house. It was during this time Max came to know the Bender family, who took them in when Max’s aunt wouldn’t have anything to do with them. In the Bender family there was this nice girl, Hilda Bender. She was his very good friend, so whenever we went to visit Max’s brother later, who settled in Lörrach, just across the frontier from Basel, we would also visit Hilda. Max always hoped his uncle would marry Hilda Bender, but he found another difficult woman when his first wife died. Max, his mother and brother, stayed with Ernst Mueller in 1919-20 for about six months trying to build up their strength. With the inflation all over central Europe there was very little to eat in Austria or what is now the Czech Republic, Bohemia, Moravia, all these provinces that had previously belonged to Austria and were taken away and given to the Czechs by the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. In spite of protests by the German population, and a referendum, they weren’t allowed to have these countries because they were the enemy, therefore they had to do what they were told. The same occurred in South Tirol at the end of the First World War – it was taken away from Tirol and given to the Italians, because the Italians changed sides and transferred themselves from the German alliance to the British alliance. They did the same thing in the Second World War. They were always turn-tails; they did very well for themselves, the Italians. This was why there was such very bad situation in Reichenberg and the reason for visiting Basel, to try and put some flesh on their bones before going back again.

Max’s brother, Louis, studied chemistry in Basel because his uncle was in Basel working with Ciba and he thought it would be a good idea. He became a Doctor of Chemistry. He didn’t return to Czechoslovakia at all at the end of the war, Max was determined to return, but his brother remained in Germany. He was not called up, but engaged in some Governmental chemical concern. Louis managed to meet up with his wife and mother-in-law as they knew he was somewhere in Germany. To survive they dyed old army uniforms into some other colour so they then could be used as clothing. There was no clothing, there was nothing. Germany was completely devastated, there were just heaps of rubble everywhere. Louis then moved to Lörrach to be near his uncle. His uncle was considerably well off, so it was good to be near him, he could help them. They had a flat; there was Louis, his wife, his mother-in-law and her sister. Louis was looking after these three ladies, and set up in business on his own as a representative for various chemical firms. In the end he did very well, he built himself a very nice house there, Max drew the plans for the house. His wife died first of cancer and Louis also died of cancer later. After his wife died he was on the lookout for lady-friends, and in the end one got him, she was only after his money. He had a great deal of difficulty with this woman. Louis had arranged to leave his house to Stephanie, though his wife would have the use of the house and his money until she died. While he was lying in bed dieing of cancer, his wife typed a new will where he left everything to her and got him to sign it. She typed it not knowing any legal procedures. A very shaky signature, he probably didn’t really know what he was doing. After he died she produced this bogus will, which of course had no witnesses. If a will is typed it has to have two witnesses to a signature. If it is written in one’s own handwriting you don’t need a witness. So of course this will was invalid, though long court cases concerning how the estate be divided up couldn’t be avoided.

This uncle in Basel, in Arlesheim, Heinrich Mueller-Gossauer, was always very well off, with various lady-friends here and there, same as Max. He bought a very nice Jugendstil Stadthaus in the centre of Reichenberg before the war, with two shops on the ground level and three stories of flats above. As it belonged to Heinrich Mueller living in Switzerland it was Swiss property. Thus, at the end of the war it couldn’t be taken away by the Czechs, it couldn’t be taken away by the Communists, requisitioned or stolen. It had a big Swiss emblem at the front to make this visible to everyone. Max and his brother were always trying to get it back but it didn’t work. Olli, Max’s Czech friend, was still living in Reichenberg, had married a doctor and had two children. The doctor was imprisoned at one stage for being anti-communist, the things that went on. After Max died, we were still thinking about this house in Reichenberg. Olli knew a very nice lawyer and on telling him this story he said, “we will try and get this house back”. Max had died, and it was only because we knew how attached he was to having some property that once belonged to his family returned, especially as all of his, his father’s and brother’s property had been confiscated by the Czechs. His one wish was to have his uncle’s property back in the family. This lawyer told us what to do; we needed the original will where his uncle had made over the house to Max before he died. We went through a lot of procedures in Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and here in Vienna. The house was bequeathed to Max, and when he died, he’d bequeathed it all to Stephanie and me. This lawyer was already an old man and very clever. He put it through that this house was eventually returned to us, Stephanie and me. We are now the legal owners of Max’s uncle’s house in Reichenberg. It’s in the centre of town, in a rather dilapidated condition as most houses there are. Stephanie goes there nearly every year if she can to see what’s going on. The flats are let at very low rates, they can’t be raised. It can’t be sold because it can only be sold to a Czech national, no foreigners. It’s not worth selling the house for nothing, so we just keep it there until times improve. When the Czech Republic joins the EU there may be more opportunities. The rents cover the costs of the maintenance and supervision. A Czech doctor lives there for nothing as he is supposed to be looking after the house as administrator. We employ a lawyer in Reichenberg to keep his eye on things, though he never sends us a report, they promise to do things and never carry them out. That’s why Stephanie tries to go there once a year to check up on them, see that the roof’s in order, there’s no great damage, to see that the money coming in from the rents is used to repair the house. We have no benefit at all, except for the fact that we own a house in Reichenberg. The town’s original name is Reichenberg, and for us it always will be so. I’m sure Max knows we only went through all this for his sake, because we knew how much it meant to him. I left the house to Stephanie in my will, maybe when the Czech Republic enters the EU there will be a possibility of selling it. Olli died, the lawyer is still there though he doesn’t practise anymore. I still hear from him at Christmas, and then our contacts with North Bohemia will be gone, except for Stephanie trying to keep the house in order.

Max suffered a great deal after his accident, when he recovered after three years in hospital and was finally discharged. He had a stiff leg, he walked with a stick. His heart was never any good, and he smoked too much. In the end he had very bad emphysema. He had a fistula in his leg as a result of the bone infection, osteomyelitis, but he didn’t want any more operations, he couldn’t bear any more hospitals. So nothing was done about this fistula, it healed up and then it opened up again, healed up and so on. It was obviously poisoning his system in some way; it wasn’t beneficial at all, probably affecting his heart in addition to this very bad emphysema. Towards the end he suffered a lot from breathlessness. He was in various hospitals for lung treatment. He had a breathing apparatus here, it was called a Bird, with a big oxygen container, which he had to use two or three times a day with a mask over his face to aid his breathing. He had a so-called puffer, which helped him every now and again. He became very breathless and couldn’t walk very far. He was very weak. Several times I had to bring him to hospital quickly, to the lung hospital in Lainz, for treatment. They helped him in some way with injections. Then he would come out again, return home.

In the end, in 1978, it was Christmas time and he was feeling very weak. It was his birthday on the 16 October and we had a visitor from Canada, Hoppie, Margaret Hopkins, a very good friend, she was in the Commission with me at the end of the war. She transferred to UNRRA as a secretary to the head of the organisation until it moved away from Vienna. She then went to England, then to Canada and married. She was here on holiday in 1978. She was here on Max’s birthday. Max said “goodbye Hoppie, you won’t be seeing me again”. He knew that he was dying, he knew that he wouldn’t last very long. We had Christmas together, he was, well not fit, but able to enjoy Christmas. Then after Christmas, New Year’s Eve, he was in bed; he didn’t have the strength to get up any longer. Friends came to see him; we drank a glass of Sekt by his bedside. On the first of January, New Year’s Day, it was very warm, ‘Foen’ weather, and Max was gasping and breathless. I rang up the doctor, “what can we do?” “Send him into hospital straight away”, back to Lainz where they knew about him. I rang up the ambulance first thing in the morning and went with him in the ambulance back to Lainz, back to the Lungenabteilung. He was slightly delirious; he was talking the whole time, and not talking a very sensible kind of conversation. I came home at lunchtime, then I went back again in the afternoon. I’d invited Evelyn, that’s my good friend Evelyn Campbell, to lunch on New Year’s Day. I had to ring her up and tell her what was happening; she said we’d roast the chicken we’d planned for lunch on New Year’s Day evening. I went back in the afternoon, but the situation hadn’t changed. This had happened before, several times, when I had to get him into hospital quickly then he more or less recovered and after two or three weeks came home again. Then the weather suddenly changed, the temperature suddenly dropped, from ten plus to ten minus all within a couple of hours. I think it was this sudden change in temperature that caused his death. They rang me up at 9 o’clock in the morning to say he’d died in the night. It was a very awful New Year, second of January. I marched off to the hospital to deal with the formalities. He was buried on the 16 January. It was such terrible weather, there were blizzards, the ground was so frozen they couldn’t dig a grave. His mother was already buried, there was a grave in the Ober St Veit cemetery, but they couldn’t open it up it was so frozen. So the funeral couldn’t take place until the 16 January. That was a day –  there was a blizzard, it was freezing, it was snowing. All I could say was, “Max, you’re being buried on a day like it would have been in Reichenberg. Max you’re going in Reichenberg weather.”

[1] I am ashamed of my people.

Kommentar schreiben

5 August 2006

Well the break turned out to be somewhat longer than planned…. In the meantime we have moved to Switzerland, and managed to buy my grandmother’s house where we have now been living for a year. I’m gradually getting to grips with country life – its pace and traditions are sometimes still peculiar, and I still don’t feel entirely Swiss. All the old villagers know me – though I don’t know them – and my pedigree, which sometimes helps. It was sad saying goodbye to Vienna and June, but it was definitely the right decision to move here. We now have an adorable baby boy, Arthur, who loves watching the cows, cats and other local “wildlife”. Stephanie is visiting me this afternoon as June wants to have a detailed account of what it all looks like. When I left I was still very adamant that June would come and visit us here soon, however, in the past year she has increasingly frail and recently fell down in her flat cracking a rib. Our house with its flat on the first floor, stairs and so on would now not be easy for her, and the journey would be very hard I think. She also feels her body is not up to it. As Stephanie has business with a bank in Basel she will pop in here on her way to Zurich to visit a friend. It will be good to hear first hand how June is doing. Sally, our wonderful Anglican vicar, who put us in touch with each other, is now also leaving Vienna to retire to the south of France with her husband Andrew. I think the coming winter will be very hard for June and she’s already asked me if I’ll be coming to Vienna. I’ll do my very best to squeeze in a visit between now and Christmas.

I haven’t been able to win a publisher’s interest in the manuscript either, though I now feel I should try and find an agent, but it’s very difficult from Switzerland! I have been able to generate the interest of Andrew Riley, Archivist & Public Services Manager at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge and promised to send him the manuscript on DVD, something I simply must do soon now. This has made June very happy and I feel at least her story won’t be totally lost. Time seems to fly by when you have a baby and are also trying to set up yet another business venture. With my grandfather’s old carpentry on the ground floor of this house, I now have a gallery and studio to paint and exhibit my paintings. With my job as sales representative for various Austrian accessory companies I am also able to add hats, jewellery, bags and so on to make a more substantial show. The idea is to establish an “alternative living room” where people can relax, inspire themselves, have a cup of tea and buy something if they wish. It’s gradually getting accepted by the locals… though it’s rather slow and hard work. However, as I don’t pay any rent, my goods are all on commission and I have all the time in the world, this simply doesn’t matter! If only June could see it too! I hope for her sake, her story is sometimes browsed through by a researcher in Cambridge, as I still feel it’s a wonderful story crossing continents, encompassing most of the great world events of the last century and from a woman’s point of view.

Kommentar schreiben

7 July 2018

Even though we moved to Arisdorf, Switzerland 13 years ago now, I still have ties to Vienna. We haven't been back for a while, but I am certain to go again soon, despite the turn Austrian politics are taking. I still translate for Mühlbauer Headwear - now in its forth generation. I am so glad I met Klaus - not only can I be paid for in hat occasionally (I do have enough hats, but hats, well, hats are just wonderful). In his book "111 Darlings, A Hat book. 111 Years of Mühlbauer Headwear" I am "Darling" number 83 and represented with a self-portrait as well as a drawing by my daughter Olivia. But even more exciting - I am almost moving in Hollywood circles - only three pages in front of me is Brad Pitt! I probably won't get so close again!

While we were in the whole moving process I worked as a sales rep for Klaus - travelling around the Austrian alps and Switzerland with a car full of hats. This was especially important in winter - when the car was full of fur. Now the fur hats have gradually got less and fake fur has come into its own. But then I was staying in small, off-beat rooms - I would unload the car every night, not daring to leave the precious load alone. There was no GPS yet. Klaus always lent me his car for these trips - meaning he was without while I spent two weeks chasing customers. I remember always being glad of my Viennese number plate - especially when I realised I was in the wrong lane, on the wrong side of the road, going in the wrong direction and the boutique I had an appointment with in just a few minutes had just disappeared round the corner. I was driving with a map spread across my knees and trying to juggle with this and the street signs. One night the maps just refused to help me - I was trying to find the room I had booked in a B&B in a residential part of a town. I finally gave up and called the owner. She tried to guide me but as all directions finally crashed she gave up and walked to the crossing to meet me (find me). These trips where quite exhausting but also interesting. Mühlbauer headwear always comes with a comprehensive colour card, every hat can be made up in a variety of combinations. But buyers invariably would choose the hat as I had it with me. And if they liked one I didn't have with me they would have it made up in black or brown. No risk! The best example of this was a hat shop in Basel - first he ordered several sheepskin hats in black and afterwards he wouldn't order any more because he couldn't sell them so well. Black is just about the worst colour against the skin - its incredibly hard, and unless you are in the full flush of youth not generally particularly flattering. I did tell him this and try to persuade him to try another colour, navy, grey, brown... but no, it had to be black. 

I did two more tours when I had already moved to Switzerland and already had Arthur. The first tour I had to find someone to come with me to babysit Arthur while I was at a meeting. Fortunately Lorraine had her mother from Canada visiting and she agreed to come with me as a cheap way of seeing a bit of Europe. It was fun having someone with me - sales repping can get a bit lonely after the 5th dinner alone. Arthur was fortunately a very easy baby. The second time my mother came with me. After that I knew I wouldn't do it again, its just not possible with kids. Olivia would never have stood for it - she spent most of her time as a baby screaming - the only way round this was to have her tied to my front all day. Not ideal for hat presentations!

Other than that I am still in Vienna because I had the wonderful opportunity of doing the drawing printed on 60,000 mugs for Schönbrunn Palace. I had been working on an exhibition: "Hand Arbeit" showing portraits of people who still made things by hand. One of the guests liked it so much she suggested me to her boss at the Schönbrunn office. I was the first living artist to do this - before they always used prints from the copper cabinet. Once, already in Switzerland, they reprinted and I received royalties. It was quite a wonderful feeling! I tried to offer another design, but as I was no longer living in Vienna and am not Austrian I guess it would have been politically difficult to argue why me and not an Austrian artist living there. I remember my opening night - there were so several sandwiches left over, so Klaus, Michael and I carried the trays up to the train station and distributed them to the homeless there. They weren't quite sure what was happening, but took them gladly. Afterwards we all went to a bar. 

Kommentar schreiben

As a child I had outbreaks of urticaria, a skin illness like a rash. I had to sit with my legs in buckets of water in Australia, the doctor said it was something to do with acid and I wasn’t allowed to eat any oranges or such things. I think its stress related, that’s my diagnosis. Anyway, when we moved to England it stopped and disappeared completely. It comes up in lumps, kind of round lumps. It gave me quite a shock when I saw my scar on my knee had gone all red recently. I took an antihistamine tablet my doctor had given me and now it appears to have gone down.

I now regularly go to do exercises and have a massage to help the circulation in my legs. The masseur’s his wife does the exercises with me and another old lady of 82, we use dumbbells, steps. We’re a couple. I put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt I keep there. Then I have a cup of coffee and a piece of bread and butter after which I go and have my massage. The masseur always takes my blood pressure and looks at my glands. His wife does a foot sole massage and then all over after I asked him if she could do it instead. They have a lamp with some kind of Chinese stone in it, which is meant to do one good. I expect it does. Then I have to be ready at 1pm for the car to pick me up. I used to receive a lift home, until he said it would now cost me 5 Euro. I said, “thank you, no, I can ask my disabled car to come and pick me up for 3 Euro”. He is Hungarian and she is Polish and very nice. I get a bit furious with him sometimes, he says something I know is wrong and I say so, then he argues and starts shouting. I said to her once, “I don’t know how you put up with it”, but she just smiled sweetly, she’s very diplomatic.

Kommentar schreiben

Normally the Ambassador gave a nice Christmas party with a big buffet, and music, all very jolly. But this Ambassador obviously didn’t like spending money on his staff. The whole of his staff were invited, the UK based, the locally engaged, the cleaners, the drivers, everybody was invited to this Christmas party. When we were all assembled we were all given a drink. After about half an hour it was announced the dining room was open, so we all marched into the dining room. Normally there’s the dining room on the first floor, you come up the stairs, come into the first big reception room, on the left there’s a smaller reception room. The big reception room has a beautiful Aubousson carpet, with a big grand piano in one corner. Then you go further on to the right, there’s a small sitting room, then you go into another reception room or dining room, then into the big dining room. So we go all round to the right and through this first dining room where there normally would have been a big buffet supper laid out with a leg of ham, bread, cold roast beef, salads and a large stilton cheese, all the things you generally have at a Christmas party in England, a proper Christmas buffet. Anyway, we went through this room, which was empty, into the big dining room where there’s a very long, long table to seat I don’t know how many guests. At the front end of this table, in the middle, there was a huge dish piled up with slices of brown bread and butter. On the left hand side of this pile of bread and butter was a hunk of very fat Geselchtes (boiled ham, but not a proper ham on a bone like you have in England). A huge chunk of it, very, very greasy with globs of fat. That was on the left hand side, and on the right was a turkey. Ah-ha, a turkey. We stood in front of these three attractive heaps of food. There were no plates, so we looked at it rather in astonishment. The waiter said, “you take one of these paper table napkins, take a piece of bread and butter, and what would you like on it, a piece of ham or turkey?” I chose turkey, and one then went away in a corner somewhere, round about the table, and ate it, and drank a glass of wine to go with it. After that, when everything was cleared away, they managed to produce some mince pies. They weren’t very good mince pies, but at least they were something English, and something Christmassy. So this was our Staff Christmas Party and we were all quite disgusted by it. There had never been a Christmas party at the Embassy like this before or since I should imagine. After I’d had this information about receiving the honour at the hands of this Ambassador I had second thoughts. I thought if I have a small reception and ask my Austrian friends, and they were given this kind of food they’ll be highly disgusted and wonder what British hospitality was coming to! I couldn’t risk that, so I went to the Commercial Counsellor after thinking about it for a week and said no thank you, I’d rather receive my honour at the hands of the Queen at Buckingham Palace. I was going to be on holiday in England then, at the end of July. Gather my courage together and enter Buckingham Palace when the time comes. I was rather afraid of all that grandeur. “All right, just in time, I’ll write to them again and tell them you don’t wish to receive your honour here, you’d rather have it at Buckingham Palace.”

So that was arranged and I went on holiday to England in July, staying with my brother and his family. Stephanie also went on holiday to Ireland with a friend of hers, Gaby Reiter. She came back to England and stayed with me at my brother’s place, Gaby was in London. I was allowed to take two guests to the Investiture and I thought of taking my brother. One had to tell all this to the protocol at Buckingham Palace beforehand, but Richard said he’d prefer his daughter, Vanessa, to go. He would drive us there, then we could go in with our invitations. He drove us to Buckingham Palace, the car broke down on the way. Something went wrong with it, but anyhow it got fixed and we managed to get there in time. Richard had to stay outside in the courtyard, he wasn’t allowed in. He had to stay with all the other chauffeurs, people coming in and out. He had a grand time talking to the other drivers and even saw Prince Philip arriving, so he saw a bit of the Royal Family. We went inside, Stephanie and Vanessa were led away to the audience chamber, a big ballroom. I was led to where the recipients were all waiting and being given instructions on how to behave and what to do. It was a beautiful room, huge paintings, lovely furniture. What impressed me – I went to the Ladies’, one storey below, the thing that had impressed me and I remembered from 10 Downing Street – were the loos, the lavatories with their beautiful mahogany surrounds. All the old-fashioned Ministry lavatories in the Government buildings were encased in mahogany. I was very pleased to see that again. The mahogany seats of the loos. Then back upstairs again to the Officer-in-charge who explained what we had to do. When our name was called out, we had to walk straight in from the side of the ballroom. A huge ballroom with a minstrels’ gallery where a small Guard’s orchestra was playing. The audience, relatives, etc. were sitting in the auditorium. The Queen and her officers were standing, let us say at the front of the ballroom facing the spectators. From the official end where the Queen was standing we were on the right and on the left of her was the exit where one marched out again. When called we had to walk in, stop in front of the Queen, standing on a small dais, turn to face her and make a small curtsey. (Afterwards, Stephanie said, “mummy, you wobbled!” I wasn’t very safe on my legs even in those days, even before the various knee operations.) Then one took, smartly, three steps forward until standing in front of the Queen. Then she will pin the medal on your breast. The Officer-in-charge, or Lord in Waiting, whatever his official title was, he was a very charming man, said, “first we will pin a hook onto your dress and then when you are standing in front of the Queen she will be handed your medal, and she will hang it on the hook. Then she will speak a few words to you, shake you by the hand, and you will take three paces back, turn smartly to the right and walk out of the ball room to the other side, where the door is open. Then the medal will be taken off and put in a box for you and the hook removed from your dress.”

So there was I, in fear and trembling, waiting for my name to be called out. There was a lady in a wheel chair before me, so she didn’t have to do any curtseying. Then it was my turn, I marched in, heart trembling and reached the Queen who was wearing a blue dress with pearls. I’d seen the Queen before when she came to the Embassy in 1968 and been introduced to her there, therefore I knew how tall she was. She’s very tiny. She was standing on the dais and I was still much taller than she. I did my little curtsey, trying not to wobble as Stephanie said I did. Took my three paces forward, she said a few words. One is not supposed to speak yourself, just answer questions; one mustn’t try and help the person in front of you to put them at their ease. I stood there; she asked where I came from, I said, “Vienna”. I didn’t like to say ‘I saw you in Vienna in 1968’, I thought that’s not the thing to say. She was handed the medal by the officer standing at her side, she took it from the cushion and hung it on the hook on the left hand side of my dress. Then she stretched out her hand to shake hands. That put me off my balance altogether. I just thought she would shake hands, but she grasped my hand very firmly and pushed me back as a sign ‘now I must step back’. I had to take my three steps backwards very quickly, having been shoved back so to say! I had to do another curtsey and then smart right turn and march out of the right hand side of the ballroom where the officer in charge removed the medal, put it in a nice little box and finally removed the hook. Then I was shown where to enter the ballroom. I had to sit right at the back and couldn’t see Stephanie and Vanessa, I had no idea where they were until the rest of the proceedings were finished. It took quite a long time, people were knighted, very high orders were given out. The Order of the British Empire is one of the lowest orders, there’s the Order of St Michael and St George, the Order of the Bath, there are various much higher orders. The Order of the British Empire is for the normal, ordinary people who have done so much service to the Crown. It was usual for every Ministry, the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the War Office, the Civil Service, the Municipal Services, various government or non-government bodies, to submit names for an honour in recognition of their services to the Crown to the Honours Department in the Prime Minister’s Office. These Lists were then submitted to the King for approval. We had been dealing with the Honours Lists throughout the War, when we had nothing else to do we had to write Honours letters to recipients. After every Investiture the details and address of every single person who had received an Honour had to be typed on flimsies and filed in small flimsy books as a record. The addressee of any letter one wrote at No. 10 Downing Street had to be looked up in these flimsy books from A to Z, to see if they had ever received an honour. If so they would be in that book. Consequently the honour, KCMG, CMG, OBE, MBE, or whatever it might be, would be typed after the person’s name at the bottom of the letter and on the envelope. No letter was sent out without the person’s name having been checked for an honour. And now I was watching all these various people receiving honours at the hands of the Queen. At the end of the Investiture everybody sang “God save the Queen”, there was no clapping, then she departed. That was the end of that. There was no reception afterwards; I thought maybe we would be offered a glass of wine or some refreshment. Then we all departed, and if you had a photographer waiting for you, you could have your photograph taken in the courtyard. It was in the summer thank goodness. My brother was waiting there and we found Vanessa and Stephanie. Richard took a photo of me holding out my honour so it can be seen. The medal has a proper pin at the back, but I didn’t pin it on my dress again, I thought that was a bit exaggerated. I was later sent a signed certificate signed by Prince Philip and the Queen, which I had framed. I now have it as my winter picture by my stove, hanging on the wall. I have a flower oil painting to hang there in the summer. On the back of the framed certificate I have put the photograph of me holding my honour in the Buckingham Palace courtyard.

So many honours were allotted to the various Government departments, the Foreign Office, Home Office, Civil Defence, whoever it might have been. Probably it was Vienna’s turn to be given the chance of giving someone an honour, an MBE and they thought of me. My name was put up to the honours committee, then no doubt the letter came back saying that it was approved. I didn’t see any of this correspondence but I know how it works. So that’s how I was awarded MBE, for long service and nobody better being around at the moment, I’m quite sure this is how it was. Much to my great surprise and also my pleasure. I had several letters of congratulations afterwards from friends in England who had read the Birthday Honours Lists published in The Times or Daily Telegraph: so now if I have an official Embassy invitation there is always the M.B.E. after my name!

After the presentation on the 29 July I visited my mother. She was in a home in Rashwood near Droitwich (the first wireless transmission in England took place in Droitwich, a spa in Worcestershire), where she was very well cared for and I just reached her in time. I think she was waiting for me to come, to tell her about my investiture. My mother was a very lively and entertaining person – she had a beautiful singing voice and was always full of energy and go. My father was very reserved, very quiet and didn't have a note of music in him at all. He couldn't even recognise 'God save the Queen', or 'God save the King' when it was played – when he saw other people standing up at the theatre and he stood up as well. Whereas my mother was very musical, she played the piano and sang beautifully. She had singing lessons in Sydney and no doubt could have made a career for herself if she'd lived in a different age. She was always full of enthusiasm and also loved gardening, as did my father. In England we joined the Women's Institute Singing Club. I used to go too, not that my singing is any good. We went to various concerts where the choir performed. She used to sing to us in the evenings. She changed into a long blue dress in the winter for dinner, the ladies of the house changed for dinner in those days. I remember her sitting at the piano in her long blue dress, sometimes singing Negro spirituals – sometimes Schumann, Schubert or Richard Strauss. She died when she was eighty-nine, I managed to see her just before she died, in 1980. I stayed in the home with her, showed her the medal and told her all about the Investiture. She died in peacefully on the evening on the 4 August, which was also the Queen Mother’s birthday. She was cremated and her ashes were then put in an urn, which my brother collected. My brother kept her ashes in his house, his little cottage where he was living after he was divorced from Sigrid. He kept the ashes because I couldn’t take them with me to Vienna. A couple of years later he married again and his second wife refused to have my mother’s ashes in her house. She’s obviously superstitious in some way. Richard said, “you’ll have to have the ashes, Karen won’t have them here”: That summer, Stephanie and her then boyfriend Andreas, were in England. I said to Stephanie, “collect the ashes from Richard and put them in a plastic bag.”  One is not allowed to take the ashes of deceased people from country to country, it’s strictly forbidden unless one obtains proper certificates, goes through the bureaucratic rigmarole, and it costs a lot of money. “It’s only thing to do, you can’t bring the urn,  (in those days the Customs were on the look out for people smuggling guns and anything metal), you’ll have to bring them in a plastic bag”. Richard put Mummy’s ashes in two plastic bags. It’s amazing the amount of ashes a body produces, it’s like sand, grey gritty sand. I had Mummy’s ashes in my bedroom for a year or two at least.

Then I thought it’s time I did something about Mummy’s ashes. I went to the cemetery up at the top of the Maxingstrasse, to the stonemason’s where they sell all these things for graveyards. I asked what an urn would cost, would they put these ashes in the urn and could I then place this in Max’s mother’s grave. That’s the grave in Ober St Veit where Max’s mother and Max are buried. “Oh no, you can’t do that, its strictly forbidden, an urn would cost 9000 Schillings, but its highly forbidden, we won’t touch it, no thank you.” So that was no good. Then I had another thought, I’ll ask the gardener who keeps the grave in order. It needed new turf putting on top of it; it has turf on top of the grave with the headstone. “Oh no, strictly forbidden, won’t touch it, nothing to do with me, I won’t do that, if I get found out I’ll get a tremendous fine.” I wasn’t going to argue, so I thought I’d do it myself. Sometime soon after I took Mummy’s ashes and a trowel, went up to the cemetery and dug her ashes in all round the sides as well as I could into the turf on top of the grave. You couldn’t see it because I dug it in and smoothed it over. The turf was in a bad way anyhow. I did it mainly round the edges, there is a stone edging round the grave. Then I rang up the gardener and said, “please re-turf it”. So now Mummy’s ashes are in Max’s grave in Ober St Veit. I had a plaque made with her name on it, “In Memory of Amy Roa Lamb”, born such and such, died such and such. It was an oblong, about 9 inches long and 4 inches in width in brass-like metal and could be glued onto the headstone. I didn’t like to stick it on to the front under Max’s name, so when Stephanie was here we stuck it on the top of the headstone. We know where it is but nobody looking at the face of the headstone would know there was a plaque at the top. Of course I expected it to stay nice and bright and everything as the shop had promised, but it turned black, the writing is still quite legible, but its no longer nice and shiny. Mummy loved being in Vienna, and it’s a lovely view from the graveyard up there, a wonderful view over the city. I thought that’s a good spot for my mother. My father was strewn in the sea, everybody strews their ashes in England, but that’s not allowed in Vienna. So that’s were Mummy is now.

Kommentar schreiben

Several years ago my daughter, Stephanie, insisted that I should make the effort of recording some of my memoirs on tape. She started me off by showing me how to use the tape recorder, sitting by me, asking me questions, encouraging me when my enthusiasm waned. When she went off to New York, an actress friend of hers here in Vienna, Alexe Schmid, took over and I kept on recording fairly regularly at her insistence. But then that also dropped off after a while until Sibylle Wehren came to visit me fairly regularly, and on hearing the story about the tapes was very enthusiastic and started me off once more. And so that is how this account has appeared on paper, in a rather unorthodox narrative style, thanks to Sibylle and her unfailing enthusiasm and for her idea of turning it into a book.

It was always my great wish as a child to reach the age of 79, i.e. the magical year 2000. Now, when I think back over my life the first 12 years in Sydney, the second 12 in Sussex and the war in London, and now the last 58 years in Vienna, which period was the most important? I think very probably the years in England – that seems to have been my real home. Austria is a lovely country with its mountains, lakes and rivers, and one of my favourite pastimes was walking in the Styrian mountains – in the Hochschwab area and in the Vienna woods. Mountains have always held a great fascination for me, from the moment I first saw the Dolomites in South Tirol. But after my various knee operations mountain walking was no longer possible. I have made the most of all that Vienna has to offer in the way of music and theatre, the ball seasons, especially the Opera Ball and the Philharmonic Ball in the famous Musikverein Saal. I have enjoyed my allotment garden – first very actively but now unfortunately only passively – for 43 years. I have been content with my life here – my marriage, my daughter, my home in the Tirolergasse (since 1950) and all my very good friends. But at the bottom of my heart I still feel I am, what the Austrian’s sometimes mockingly call – “very British”.

Kommentar schreiben

June slipped away peacefully and in quiet expectation of what she used to call “heaven” on 10^th October 2010 at 10am. A memorial service was held for her at Christ Church Vienna on November 12, 2010. Though living in Switzerland, I did see her every time I visited Vienna and took her out to lunch in one of her favourite restaurants in Hietzing. She would always say she couldn’t eat much, but then would manage to enjoy a delicious “Tafelspitz”. I contacted Stephanie, still living in New York, but visiting her mother regularly, hoping she would decide to move back to be with June for her last months. Here are some of our emails regarding June:

 
10 October 2009

Dear Sibylle,
June is in a geriatric hospital, she can hardly speak, my friend Alexe has bought a cell phone for her because they have no telephones at the bed (it is the poor people section, 6 women in a room etc, the first time I called via the nurse he gave me the wrong patient to talk to .....), she is being taught how to answer her new phone and I managed to talk to her briefly again today. She slept better for the first time last night and they are doing all kinds of tests, but as far as I can tell all her symptoms are "old age morbidity" as the doctors call it. I hope she can stay for a while, but in any case (unless a miracle happens) she will need 24 hour care at home ...... so here we are again with the old dilemma..... all we can do at this point is take it day by day and hope for the best. My plan was to return shortly before Thanksgiving and stay till at least February. I have work here in November and even though that would not bring in a lot of money, it would still be better than having to give that up as well ... all a tricky situation.
June's number 0043/650/433 1146 - I am not sure that she will pick up unless she is expecting a phone call, but there is no harm in giving it a try if you feel like it.
It was lovely to see you in Vienna and June really enjoyed her outing with you!!
Lots of love,
Stephanie

11 October 2009

Dear Stephanie,

thanks for the info. I tried to call June but her phone was switched off. I'll try again tomorrow.

Personally, life has taught me one thing - human relationships are probably the most important thing, and you only die once. Jobs come and go. As an employee, however good you are, you are totally replaceable. June adores you. I think it’s a matter of priorities and also living with yourself afterwards.  I don't think she will be around much longer and she doesn't want to be a burden to you. She has bought you a flat in Vienna which can't have been easy, and allowed you to spread your wings. If I were you, I would pack my bags and move home for a few months. You have been successful in finding work, which sounded excellent, when you were in Vienna a few months ago - in Vienna you are "the interesting Austrian actress who survived New York" in New York you are one of 10000s trying to make it. As you now have a green card and still many years of activity ahead of you, and New York is unlikely to disappear, you can always go back.

Sorry, I know it’s not my position to say this, and please excuse me, but I care for June very much and I would love to have been able to take her to Switzerland for a holiday. However, it’s simply not possible. When my grandmother was dying - who was a rock to me all through my childhood and young adulthood; I took the train to Switzerland on Christmas day.

June is 88. The inevitable has to be faced. She probably won't live to be 100. On the other hand she's had the most fascinating and fulfilled life. I think the best present you could give her, would be to be with her and enable her to say goodbye in a dignified and at home manner. There must be some support network to help you take care of her at home, so you could also go out and about.

Well that's all from me, please don't be angry. I have no idea of your life in New York, what you do, but I do know about old people, old people's homes, hospitals for old people and a little bit about old people dying. I had to deal with it at 16 when my grandfather passed away in his sleep - I had to call all the relatives to inform them, order his coffin....and I still hate the fact that as an arrogant teenager I didn't want to go for a walk with him the day before he died because it might not look "cool". I sincerely hope he was able to forgive me.

I wish you all the very best, God be with you and help you through this difficult time.

lots of love

Sibylle

22 September 2010

Dear Sibylle,
We have all had a very challenging year so far .... and it will most likely continue.
June was in hospital for 2, 5 weeks in August as she was in a very bad state and the doctor prepared me for the worst. However she rallied once more and came home in better shape. They took her off the anti-dementia medication which can have side effects to the heart .... and obviously did with June.
She is now temporarily (3 weeks) in a nursing home while I am in New York to sort out my life here. Then back to Vienna where I resume my 24 hour nursing job, start teaching at university and also will do a small play.
I have basically given up my life here for June - not an easy decision and still hope to be able to keep my flat - once that is gone I am gone for good.

Wishing you all the best and better times for all of us.
Love,
Stephanie

10 October 2010

Dear Friends and Family!

Liebste Freunde!!

First let me thank you for your prayers and uplifting thoughts for June's gallblader etc. surgery on Thursday!! The operation went well; she came out coherently and was quite awake and alert. Friday she kept asking for Earl Grey tea (which of course was not yet permitted), drank a lot of water and herbal teas and only had a little pain. I spent both afternoons with her. Saturday morning the hospital called to inform me that her condition had worsened and that she was not responsive and suggested I should come earlier than planned. 

I spent 24 hours at her side (all night as well) and left today a 9AM (while June's dear friend Helen came to relieve me for a few hours). As soon as I got home, the call came: June passed away today October(10), 10^th at 10 AM, 2010 (I find this interesting). She died peacefully in her sleep, and was still in her hospital bed when I returned.

I know that June is well. I know that  and yet, I can hardly believe that it went so fast and that she is no longer here with me ....and I am dreading all the bureaucracy and the possible fight with my mother's landlord as I would love to keep this flat I grew up in.

So, this time around I am asking for prayer for me - that all that lies ahead will resolve itself peacefully and smoothly.

Love and Blessings,

Stephanie

Dear Stephanie,

My heartfelt condolences - I guess you won't have got the message I left on your US phonebox. I was sure it was the last time I would see June in person last time we were in Vienna, and I wish I had been wrong. I still miss the wonderful afternoons with her drinking tea and taking her for the occasional walk down to the bench. She was a really great person to know, and I'm extremely grateful to have had the opportunity - also for an in-depth insight into her amazing life. She rather made history "real" for me.... we did modern history at school and I hated it- but knowing June gave me a totally new and immediate perspective.

We were watching a Churchill documentary the other day and I had to smile as I remembered her telling me of the incident when she met him on the stairs in her dressing gown!

I know you will have your hands full of things to do now, and I wish I could be of help. I am determined to come to the memorial service in November, so please keep me posted. If there is anything I can do from here do let me know.

I look forward to seeing you in November, and am sure June will be watching from above.

All the very very best,

love Sibylle

It was a lovely service, and very interesting to meet all the people involved in June’s interesting life. Many of them mentioned “the book about her life” and it was wonderful that I had managed to contribute to keeping her remarkable story alive. I still miss her.